Martin, Picoult among authors in Authors Guild lawsuit against OpenAI

The Authors Guild—along with 17 authors including George R R Martin, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen—filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI in the United States last Tuesday, said the guild in a statement.

The suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, is for ‘copyright infringement of their works of fiction on behalf of a class of fiction writers whose works have been used to train GPT’.

The Authors Guild said that it organised the lawsuit ‘after witnessing first-hand the harm and existential threat to the author profession wrought by the unlicensed use of books to create large language models that generate texts’, and that the suit ‘draws attention to the fact that the plaintiffs’ books were downloaded from pirate ebook repositories and then copied into the fabric’ of the generative AI products, ‘from which OpenAI expects to earn many billions’.

Other named plaintiffs include David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor LaValle, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow and Rachel Vail. The Authors Guild has published the full complaint on its website.

The UK Society of Authors recently expressed support for a class-action lawsuit brought in a San Francisco federal court against OpenAI, also for copyright infringement, which comes as the industry continues to discuss the potential impacts and risks of generative AI developments.

Category: International news