Jodi Picoult, George RR Martin among authors suing OpenAI over ChatGPT

More than a dozen novelists, including “My Sister’s Keeper” author Jodi Picoult and “A Game of Thrones” writer George R.R. Martin filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Open AI over its chatbot technology, ChatGPT.

The suit, filed under the Copyright Act of 1976 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses OpenAI of copying the authors’ works “wholesale without permission or consideration,” according to court documents obtained by The Hill.

The complaint, filed in conjunction with the Authors Guild, the largest and oldest professional organization for writers in the U.S., goes on to accuse OpenAI of feeding the copyrighted works into “large language models” (LLMs), algorithms designed to produce text responses to users’ prompts or 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,” the suit reads.

The lawsuit goes on to claim that Open AI’s LLMs endanger the ability of fiction writers to make a living.

“Plaintiffs seek to represent a class of professional fiction writers whose works
spring from their own minds and their creative literary expression.

“These authors’ livelihoods derive from the works they create. But Defendants’ LLMs endanger fiction writers’ ability to make a living, in that the LLMs allow anyone to generate—automatically and freely (or very cheaply)—texts that they would otherwise pay writers to create,” according to the suit.

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Attorneys for the plaintiffs claim that the LLMs can then create derivative works, material that copies, summarizes or paraphrases the authors’ works, which the suit claims harms “the market for them.”

“Unfairly, and perversely, without Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works on which to ‘train’ their LLMs, Defendants would have no commercial product with which to damage—if not usurp—the market for these professional authors’ works. Defendants’ willful copying thus makes Plaintiffs’ works into engines of their own destruction.”

Aside from Picoult and Martin, other authors named as plaintiffs in the suit are David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor LaValle, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow and Rachel Vail.

The authors are seeking damages for “the lost opportunity to license their works” and for market appropriation, of which the suit accuses OpenAI.

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