MOVIE NEWS – A host of screenwriters and authors, including George R.R. Martin, are filing a class action lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement.

George R. R. Martin, the writer of Game of Thrones and the award-winning video game Elden Ring (among many others), is suing OpenAI along with more than a dozen other authors. The author of the popular fantasy series and Authors Guild staff have unveiled a lengthy and devastating complaint. It accuses the generative AI program of copyright infringement.

OpenAI is one of the largest companies responsible for AI-generated texts on the market today. Although originally founded as a non-profit AI research organisation in 2015, it became a for-profit company four years later.

Since then, it has received billions of dollars in investment, eventually releasing ChatGPT, a public AI chatbot that has quickly become one of the largest apps in history.

Now, 17 members of the Authors Guild, including Martin and Guild President Scott Turow, have joined forces to file a 47-page lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement. In nearly 350 paragraphs, the plaintiffs accuse OpenAI of several crimes against creativity and writing. They are calling for a class-action lawsuit against the company involving authors worldwide. In addition to a ban on further use of copyrighted works for AI training, the plaintiffs are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work.

Their complaint is based on the fact that OpenAI uses copyrighted text to train its artificial intelligence algorithms. Historically, ChatGPT could be induced to publish direct quotes from novels. For example, from the Game of Thrones series. Recent updates have removed this feature. However, ChatGPT is still able to provide accurate summaries and derivative works. This proves that OpenAI is still using literary texts to train its program illegally. Given that OpenAI also questions where it gets its material from, Martin et al. assume that it is almost certainly scraping text from pirate sites.

The plaintiffs also accuse ChatGPT of posing as authors to help users create books using artificial intelligence.

Famous authors have discovered that poor-quality books written by AI have been published under their names. They were then sold directly on Amazon. Thus damaging their reputation. The authors say all professional writers should be outraged.

At the time of writing, the OpenAI conglomerate has not yet commented on the allegations. The plaintiffs have asked for the case to be tried before a jury. Judging by George R. R. Martin’s statement, the mastermind behind Elden Ring and its associates is clearly serious about the case.

Source: Courtlistener