George R. R. Martin and other major authors sue OpenAI

On Tuesday, Sept. 19, many famous authors, including George R. R. Martin and Jodi Picoult, joined the Authors Guild in filing a class action lawsuit against the software company OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. The lawsuit states that OpenAI has used their works without their permission to teach its AI programs how to create human-like responses.  

“Everything has disadvantages and these are the disadvantages of OpenAI.” Thomas S. Wootton junior Serin Palathingal said.

Specifically, the lawsuit claims that the company fed the writers’ works into large language models (LLM), in order to teach the AI to “talk” like how a human would. The lawsuit states that with this data, the technology can create works that “mimics, summarizes, or paraphrases” their work.

This lawsuit is one of many objections taken against AI’s recent impact over the world of creative works. Four other authors and a comedian sued Meta and OpenAI in June and July for the same reasons. In January, digital artists sued text-to-image generators, stating they solely work through copyrighted artwork. 

Additionally, the authors’ lawsuit states that such programs impair the authors’ ability to make a living wage since it makes texts that writers would otherwise be paid to create. “I think it’s unfair for them,” Thomas S. Wootton HS junior Aarna Rastogi said. “They’ve spent so long building their skills and knowledge for AI to come in and almost replace them.”

Moreover, these LLMs generate texts immediately and freely, allowing anyone to generate a piece of work, and go so far as to even impersonate authors. 

The lawsuit alleges that a programmer, Liam Swayne, used ChatGPT to create versions of the two final books of Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire, that Martin is currently writing. The lawsuit states this would not have been possible unless Martin’s works were fed into ChatGPT. 

Another case of such impersonation was when author Jane Friedman discovered that books that she did not write were being sold on Amazon under her name.

Also, the same lawsuit states that ChatGPT accurately produced summaries of authors’ works, including Jodi Picoult’s books Keeping Faith, Handle With Care, and Sing You Home. ChatGPT also created outlines for two of Picoult’s supposed upcoming sequels, those being The Small Great Things and My Sister’s Keeper, and named them “Small Great Things: Unfinished Business” and “My Sister’s Legacy” respectively. These outlines used the same characters from her existing books. This has not only happened to Picoult, but to countless authors including- David Baldacci and John Grisham.

As seen, AI has immense power, and controlling it is no easy feat. “Completely stopping [AI] would be hard and criticized,” Palathingal said. “However we can still place limits on it so it can help people but also not hurt others,”

Hopefully such lawsuits, complaints and maybe future legislation can do so and help protect authors and creativity as the presence of AI technology grows. “AI can’t ever completely replace authors,” Rastogi said. “It’s humans who think up stories and make up the worlds so many people love to immerse themselves in,”

Written by Anushka Gulla of Thomas S. Wootton High School

Photo Courtesy of Flickr