The authors have filed a class action lawsuit, calling unauthorized use of fiction to train AI"identity theft on a grand scale."A group of 17 authors, including Game of Thrones novelist George R.R. Martin, have filed a class action lawsuit against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI on behalf of fiction writers who believe that their work was used to train the generative AI chatbot.
The full list of authors who've put their names on the suit is: David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor LaValle, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow, and Rachel Vail.
As their name implies,"large language models" like ChatGPT require a lot of training data, and the companies behind them are not known for being discerning about what they scrape from the internet. Rather than trying to avoid scraping hate speech and other offensive material, for instance,According to the complaint, ChatGPT previously responded to requests to cite passages from copyrighted books with"a good degree of accuracy," and only recently started declining the prompt.
"Great books are generally written by those who spend their careers and, indeed, their lives, learning and perfecting their crafts," said Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger."To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI. The various GPT models and other current generative AI machines can only generate material that is derivative of what came before it.