The Authors Guild, led by authors including John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jonathan Franzen has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claimig the company “in a systematic course of mass-scale copyright infringement” to “power their lucrative commercial endeavor.”
The suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that OpenAI’s models directly threaten the ability of writers to make a living wage, as the technology generates texts that writers could be paid to pen, as well as uses copyrighted material to create similarly sounding work.
According to the suit:
“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. Moreover, Defendants’ LLMs can spit out derivative works: material that is based on, mimics, summarizes, or paraphrases Plaintiffs’ works, and harms the market for them.”
The class-action lawsuit is now among other legal actions, organizations, and individuals over how OpenAI and other generative AI systems impact original creative works.
According to CNN, an author told them in August that she found new books being sold on Amazon under her name — only she didn’t write them; they appear to have been generated by AI.
