George R.R. Martin is pursuing legal action alongside several famous authors.
The Game of Thrones writer joins the Authors Guild, John Grisham, Michael Connelly, Jodi Picoult and a group of other famous fiction writers in a class action lawsuit on Wednesday (September 20) against OpenAI, claiming the AI technology is infringing on their works, via Deadline.
The authors claim that OpenAI copied their works “wholesale, without permission or consideration,” and argue that the company fed their works into large language models, “algorithms designed to output human-seeming text responses to users’ prompts and queries.”
“Generative AI is a vast new field for Silicon Valley’s longstanding exploitation of content providers. Authors should have the right to decide when their works are used to ‘train’ AI. If they choose to opt in, they should be appropriately compensated,” author Jonathan Franzen said in a statement.
Read the full complaint here.
Other authors in the case include David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Sylvia Day, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor LaValle, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow, and Rachel Vail.
The lawsuit seeks class certification, an injunction prohibiting their works from being used in the large language models without authorization, unspecified actual damages and, alternatively, statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, via Deadline.
Terrence Hart, general counsel of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement: “We agree that unauthorized use of literary works by AI developers presents serious questions of law that cannot simply be dismissed with assertions that the technology is ‘innovative.’ Innovative for whom? At what cost? Under what rules? We will follow the lawsuit closely.”
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