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A trade group of American authors has sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court on behalf of prominent writers, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult and Game of Thrones novelist George R.R. Martin, accusing the company of illegally training its popular AI-based chatbot. ChatGPT, with its work.

The proposed class-action lawsuit, filed Tuesday by the Authors Guild, joins several others filed by writers, source code owners and visual artists against generative artificial intelligence providers. In addition to OpenAI, there are similar lawsuits pending against Meta Platforms and Stability AI over data used to train their AI systems.

Other authors involved in the latest lawsuit include The Lincoln Lawyer writer Michael Connelly and legal novelists David Baldacci and Scott Turow.

Representatives for OpenAI did not respond to Reuters' request for comment on Wednesday's lawsuit. OpenAI and other defendant AI companies have claimed that their use of training data collected from the internet qualifies as fair use under U.S. copyright law.

Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild said in a statement Wednesday that authors "must have the ability to control whether and how their works are used by generative artificial intelligence" to "preserve our literature."

The Authors Guild's lawsuit contends that the datasets used to train OpenAI's large language model to respond to human cues included text from the authors' books that may have been taken from illegal online repositories of "pirated" books.

The complaint claimed that ChatGPT generated accurate summaries of the authors' books when prompted, indicating that their text is included in its database.

He also cited growing concerns that authors could be replaced by systems like ChatGPT that "generate low-quality books, supplanting authors and displacing books written by humans."

  • ChatGPT
  • United States
  • Artificial intelligence