'Game of Thrones' author, other writers sue ChatGPT creator over copyrights

SAN FRANCISCO, United States — "Game of Thrones" author George RR Martin and other best-selling fiction writers have filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the tech startup of violating their copyrights to fuel its generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.

The Authors Guild, an organization representing writers, and several novelists including Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult, accused the California-based company of using their books "without permission" to train ChatGPT's "large language models," algorithms capable of producing human-sounding text responses based on simple queries, according to the lawsuit.

"And at the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a massive scale," said the complaint, filed Tuesday in a New York federal court.

Numerous other lawsuits have been filed by artists, organizations, and coders against OpenAI and its competitors, with the plaintiffs claiming their work has been ripped off.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The firm's language models "endanger fiction writers' ability to make a living, in that the (models) allow anyone to generate — automatically and freely (or very cheaply) — texts that they would otherwise pay writers to create," Tuesday's complaint read.

ChatGPT can be used to produce "derivative works," imitating the style of writers, it added.

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"Unfairly, and perversely, without Plaintiffs' copyrighted works on which to 'train' their (language models), Defendants would have no commercial product with which to damage — if not usurp — the market for these professional authors' works," the complaint said. "Defendants' willful copying thus makes Plaintiffs' works into engines of