George R.R. Martin sues ChatGPT’s parent company over copyright infringement

George R. R. Martin created a gripping setting for his television series Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire by weaving complex stories centered on marginalized characters. Tyrion Lannister, Arya Stark, and Theon Greyjoy are just a few of the characters whose stories Martin uses to illustrate the hardships of those who don’t conform to social conventions. However, this world has been invaded by AI, and Martin is having none of it.

George R. R. Martin fights back against AI

Over the past couple of years, several renowned figures from the entertainment industry have expressed their concerns over the rise of AI. It has not only been attributed to the loss of livelihoods, but also the stealing of someone else’s art without their consent.

Quite recently, a number of best-selling authors including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, and Elin Hilderbrand have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, alleging that it violated their copyrights by feeding their books into its “large language models” and engaged in “systematic theft on a large scale.”

What is the complaint lodged against ChatGPT owners?

According to the lawsuit, Liam Swayne, a programmer, used ChatGPT to “write” the follow-ups to George R.R. Martin’s best-selling book series “A Song of Ice and Fire,” which was turned into the popular HBO series “Game of Thrones.” The two last volumes in the series have not yet been released by Martin, who is presently writing them according to the complaint, but Swayne utilized ChatGPT to write his own versions of these books, which he then placed online.

The suit also added that ChatGPT has also created prequels and alternate versions of his books: “When prompted, ChatGPT accurately generated summaries of several of the Martin infringed works, including summaries for Martin’s novels ‘A Game of Thrones,’ ‘A Clash of Kings,’ and ‘A Storm of Swords,’ the first three books in the series A Song of Ice and Fire.”

“ChatGPT could not have generated the results described above if OpenAI’s LLMs had not ingested and been ‘trained’ on the Martin infringed works,” the complaint alleges.

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