The 20s may go down as a period of reckoning when artists and other creatives battle against large corporate suits to get everything they’re worth. George R.R. Martin, aka Tyrian Lannister, writer of the Game Thrones series of books has joined a class action suit against OpenAI. Martin and 17 authors from the Authors Guild.
The authors sued OpenAI contending the company “copied their works wholesale, without permission or consideration” and fed them in large language models powering ChatGPT. Additionally, the authors added that OpenAI’s large language models could result in, “derivative works that is based on, mimics, summarizes, or plagiarizes,” their work. True.
This is the latest lawsuit against OpenAI brought by authors from the Guild, but this one could be more damaging. John Grisham is one of the authors on this suit and several of his books have turned into movies. Damages from any derivative works “written” by ChatGPT could be huge.
Stakes Is High
The stakes are incredibly high. Right now, thousands of students are having ChatGPT write essays and treatments potentially trained on previously copyrighted material. The cascading effect of using copyrighted materials to produce other copyrighted materials in unimaginable.
We just reported an incident involving a man trying to copyright generative art with the US Copyright Office denying his request. In response, the US Copyright is taking up the copyright issue. They’ve launched an Artificial Intelligence Study seeking public comments on whether generative AI derivative works should receive copyright protection. If you have an opinion, now is the time to share your thoughts and insights.
Generative AI companies have been flirting with copyright and ownership laws since coming on the scene. Their models require huge amounts of data to work. Laws regarding fair use generally don’t cover reselling derivative works and anything cranked out of an LLM is derivative. For its part, Microsoft says it’ll provide legal cover for companies using OpenAI’s GPT products or Microsoft Copilot.