George RR Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones book series, is among a group of 17 authors who have accused a Microsoft-backed company of using their copyrighted novels to train a popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.
The collective lawsuit was filed by the Authors Guild, representing 17 authors, including Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, and George RR Martin.In the complaint, the authors allege that OpenAI copied their works "wholesale, unauthorized, or without compensation" and used them to train the chatbot.
They claim that this has jeopardized the authors' ability to make a living from their work.
The document states, "These algorithms lie at the heart of Defendants' massive commercial enterprise, and at the center of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale."The lawsuit argues that the use of AI chatbots allows companies to create materials that "represent, mimic, summarize, or otherwise communicate" the works of authors.
The authors allege that the company trained ChatGPT on a dataset that may have included text illicitly uploaded from authors' books to the internet, rather than using publicly available data.
The lawsuit also contends that the company should have paid a licensing fee for the content.
