John Grisham And US Novelists Sue OpenAI For Using Their Work For ChatGPT

John Grisham cs. sue OpenAI. (photo: twitter @JohnGrisham ·)

JAKARTA - A trade group for US writers or novelists has sued OpenAI in Manhattan's federal court on behalf of leading writers, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult, and novelist George RR Martin. The lawsuit accuses the artificial intelligence company of unlawfully training popular artificial intelligence-based chatbot ChatGPT, using their work.

The class-action lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild on Tuesday 19 September joined a number of other lawsuits from authors, source code owners, and visual artists against generative AI providers. Apart from OpenAI, similar lawsuits are also addressed to Meta Platforms and AI Stabilities related to the data used to train their AI systems.

Other authors involved in the latest lawsuit include authors "The Lincoln Lawyer" Michael Connelly and attorney-novelis David Baldacci and Scott Turow.

Representatives from OpenAI have not responded to requests for comment on Wednesday, September 20. OpenAI and other AI defendants have claimed that the use of training data taken from the internet meets the requirements as reasonable use under copyright law in the United States.

Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement on Wednesday that her writers "must have the ability to control whether and how their work is used by a generative AI" to "maintain our literature."

The Authors Guild lawsuit states that the dataset used to train OpenAI's big language model is in order to respond to human orders including text from authors' books that may be taken from illegal "piracy" book repositories on the internet.

The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT generates accurate summarys of its authors' books when requested, suggesting that their text is included in the ChatGPT database.

The lawsuit also notes growing concerns that writers can be replaced by systems like ChatGPT that "producing low-quality ebooks, posing as writers, and replacing books written by humans."