Game of Thrones Author, Other Top Writers Sue OpenAI For Plagiarism

A group of renowned fiction writers, along with the Authors Guild (AG), have filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI.

George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, and Jonathan Franzen are among the 17 prominent authors who have joined the lawsuit led by AG, a professional organization dedicated to safeguarding writers' rights. I Photo: Gage Skidmore

They allege that the company's technology is unlawfully using their copyrighted work, Jennifer Korn reported for CNN.

The complaint asserts that OpenAI, the company responsible for the viral chatbot ChatGPT, is engaging in acts of "flagrant and harmful" copyright infringement by copying famous works and utilizing them to train algorithms, which in turn, teach systems how to generate more human-like text responses.

George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, and Jonathan Franzen are among the 17 prominent authors who have joined the lawsuit led by AG, a professional organization dedicated to safeguarding writers' rights.

The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, contends that OpenAI's models directly harm writers' ability to earn a livable wage.

The technology generates texts that writers could be paid to create, and it also uses copyrighted material to produce imitative work. "Generative AI threatens to devastate the author profession," stated the Authors Guild in a press release on Wednesday.

The lawsuit alleges that books created by these authors that were illicitly downloaded and fed into GPT systems could potentially generate profits for OpenAI by "writing" new works in the authors' styles, while the original creators receive nothing.

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