The latest group of authors to sue OpenAI includes Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, and George R.R. Martin.
The Authors Guild, a professional organization for published writers, is joining with the authors in a class-action suit against OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that has drawn fire for using books, without permission from their creators, to train its ChatGPT bot. The suit claims that OpenAI infringed on their copyrights.
In a news release, Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the guild, said, “To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI. The various GPT models and other current generative AI machines can only generate material that is derivative of what came before it. They copy sentence structure, voice, storytelling, and context from books and other ingested texts. The outputs are mere remixes without the addition of any human voice.”
Two other groups of authors have also filed suit against OpenAI. In July, novelists Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay sued the company; another suit filed by writers Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Golden followed days later.
The other plaintiffs in the Authors Guild suit 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.
“It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.,” Rasenberger said. “Great books are generally written by those who spend their careers and, indeed, their lives, learning and perfecting their crafts.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
