Article by Ars Technica: Various prominent writers like John Grisham, George R. R. Martin, David Baldacci and others are suing ChatGPT creator OpenAI for copyright infringement and unfair business practices.
GRRM just mad AI will finish the series before he does.
The show left such a bad taste in my mouth, I forgot we were still waiting on books.
I’m pretty sure he forgot too
One of the major problems for him seems to be that the show left such a bad taste in his mouth too. In some interviews he hinted at that and also that the show’s horrible ending messed with the plans he had had for the books.
I believe the claims that OpenAI scrolled not just libraries of books with rights expired but pirated works where rights are still active. And they said they “used the entire internet” as a way of hidinf behind it like they had no choice but to do this. Not only is not choosing a choice in itself, I think this was intentional.
Yeah, I have very little doubt that this is what happened. They probably never bothered to restrict their crawlers and just let them crawl all piracy sites too.
My only question is why are individual authors doing the suing and not the publishers?
For every mega-author like GRRM or Sanderson there are tens of thousands of authors that cannot afford to do anything about their works being stolen by LLMs. With how big a cut publishing takes it would make sense if publishers negotiate on behalf of all their authors. Instead, the big four in the US seem to be chasing after non-issues like limiting library and Internet Archive access, while leaving the real issues with AI out to dry…
It’s a legal thing: The owners of the copyright have to sue and in the book publishing business that’s usually the author. I assume that the publishers are involved too, but not as the official plaintiffs.
