George RR Martin among US authors to sue OpenAI

Authors Guild members, including the 'Game of Thrones' writer and Jodi Picoult, file a fresh lawsuit against the ChatGPT owner | Suit is ‘merely the beginning’ of action to protect authors | Case is latest in a raft of allegations by creators who claim the generative AI tool stole their work.

A group of bestselling authors have levelled the latest attack on  ChatGPT for alleged copyright infringement by producing “accurately generated summaries” of their works when prompted.

The Authors Guild and 17 of its members, including novelist and former lawyer and politician  John Grisham (author of The Pelican Brief), filed the complaint on Tuesday, September 19, in New York.

Jodi Picoult (My Sister’s Keeper),  George RR Martin (Game of Thrones),  Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections), and  David Baldacci (Camel Club) were also among the plaintiffs.

They accuse ChatGPT owner  OpenAI of copying their works “wholesale, without permission or consideration”, before feeding the works into ChatGPT’s ‘large language models’ (LLMs)—algorithms designed to produce human-like text responses to users’ prompts and queries.

“These algorithms are at the heart of defendants’ massive commercial enterprise. And at the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale,” said the suit.

The lawsuit is just the latest in a string of disputes brought by authors against OpenAI and ChatGPT.

Last week, a group of novelists, playwrights and screenwriters—including Pulitzer Prize winner  Michael Chabon—sued OpenAI for allegedly using their works to train ChatGPT.

In July, US comedian, actress and writer  Sarah Silverman, plus two other authors, sued OpenAI and  Meta for  allegedly copying content from their books to train their AI software.

Meanwhile, nations around the world are grappling with how to regulate AI, with the  proposed EU AI Act potentially being the first law of its kind to be passed.

And yesterday the  World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) kicked off a two-day  virtual conference on generative AI and IP.

OpenAI ‘opaque’ about where books were procured

Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has catapulted to unprecedented success, with an estimated 100 million monthly active users by January 2023, according to the complaint.

In what the plaintiffs describe as a “straightforward infringement case”, they argue that OpenAI’s chatbots are able to produce “derivative works”—“the creation of which is inherently based on the original unlawfully copied work”.

They add that these derivative works could be licensed by the authors of the underlying works to willing, paying licensees, but that OpenAI is “characteristically opaque about where and how it procured the entirety of these books”.

In the complaint, reference is made to OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, who was among tech bosses who  testified before the US Senate in May this year on rules for AI.

Altman told Congress during the subcommittee hearing that “OpenAI does not want to replace creators. We want our systems to be used to empower creativity, and to support and augment the essential humanity of artists and creators.”

He also spoke of OpenAI’s belief that “creators deserve control over how their creations are used” and that “content creators, content owners, need to benefit from this technology.”

The authors’ lawsuit additionally noted that Altman told senators that OpenAI has “licens[ed] content directly from content owners” for “training” purposes.

“Not so from Plaintiffs,” said the complaint. “...Altman and defendants have proved unwilling to turn these words into actions.”

Rachel Geman, a partner with Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel for the plaintiffs, said that without the authors’ copyrighted works, the defendants “would have a vastly different commercial product.

“Defendants’ decision to copy authors’ works, done without offering any choices or providing any compensation, threatens the role and livelihood of writers as a whole.”

Scott Sholder, a partner with Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard and co-counsel for the plaintiffs, added: “Plaintiffs don’t object to the development of generative AI, but [the] defendants had no right to develop their AI technologies with unpermitted use of the authors’ copyrighted works.

“Defendants could have ‘trained’ their large language models on works in the public domain or paid a reasonable licensing fee to use copyrighted works.”

Authors Guild: Lawsuit is ‘merely the beginning’

Maya Shanbhag Lang, president of the Authors Guild, said in a statement: “The Authors Guild serves to protect the literary landscape and the profession of writing.

“This case is merely the beginning of our battle to defend authors from theft by OpenAI and other generative AI.

“Our staff, which includes a formidable legal team, has expertise in copyright law. This is all to say: We do not bring this suit lightly. We are here to fight.”

The other authors involved in the lawsuit are Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, George Saunders, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor Lavalle, Douglas Preston, Roxanna Robinson, Scott Turow and Rachel Vail.

The complaint was also filed “on behalf of others similarly situated”.

The lawsuit noted that “until very recently, ChatGPT could be prompted to return quotations of text from copyrighted books with a good degree of accuracy, suggesting that the underlying LLM must have ingested these books in their entireties [sic] during its ‘training’.”

Now, ChatGPT generally responds to such prompts with the statement, “I can’t provide verbatim excerpts from copyrighted texts,” noted the complaint, suggesting the tool has been “restrained, if only temporarily”.

“In light of its timing, this apparent revision of ChatGPT’s output rules is likely a

response to the type of activism on behalf of authors exemplified by the Open Letter addressed to OpenAI and other companies [by the Authors Guild in June 2023].

“Instead of ‘verbatim excerpts’, ChatGPT now offers…a summary of the copyrighted book, which usually contains details not available in reviews and other publicly available material—again suggesting that the underlying LLM must have ingested the entire book during its ‘training’, explained the plaintiffs.

ChatGPT ‘enables’ derivative works by third parties

The complaint also noted that businesses and other third parties are emerging, which enable users of ChatGPT to create derivative stories from works of fiction, such as Socialdraft.

The authors also allege that the tool “is being used to generate low-quality ebooks, impersonating authors, and displacing human-authored books”. For example, Jane Friedman discovered “a cache of garbage books” written under her name for sale on Amazon.

According to  Reuters, an OpenAI spokesperson said on Wednesday that the company respects authors’ rights and is "having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild.”

The complaint was filed at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Counsel for the plaintiffs are Rachel Geman, Reilly Stoler and Ian R Bensberg of  Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein; along with Scott Sholder and CeCe Cole of  Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard.