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John Grisham, other top US authors sue OpenAI over copyrights

https://www.reuters.com/legal/john-grisham-other-top-us-authors-sue-openai-over-copyrights-2023-09-20/

A trade group for U.S. 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 unlawfully training its popular artificial-intelligence based chatbot ChatGPT on their work.

7 comments

darkpanda

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It could also indicate that other summaries of the texts were used to train the LLM and that it is summarizing those summaries. The actual book doesn’t need to be there, unless you can have it spit out the actual text of the book itself?

autotldr

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

Sept 20 (Reuters) - A trade group for U.S. 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 unlawfully training its popular artificial-intelligence based chatbot ChatGPT on their work.

The proposed class-action lawsuit filed late on Tuesday by the Authors Guild joins several others from writers, source-code owners and visual artists against generative AI providers.

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

OpenAI and other AI defendants have said their use of training data scraped from the internet qualifies as fair use under U.S. copyright law.

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

The original article contains 282 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

DLSchichtl

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Are we going to keep reposting this article with a different author every day? Yesterday it was GRRM, before that someone else

Wilshire

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That was probably in a different community. I can't find any posts in this one.

beejjorgensen

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Seems like three issues.

Downloading a pirated copy of the work. Pretty clear cut that this is illegal.
Feeding a work into an algorithm. This seems to me like it should be legal. Making it illegal looks like it would open an incredibly shitty can of worms.
Generating and distributing a partial copy of a copyrighted work. ("The AI just spat out three paragraphs of my text nearly verbatim!") It's unclear if this is even happening.

ilickfrogs

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I'm getting real sick of this lawsuit crap regarding AI. Precedent case law already says you can't copyright work produced by AI. So what exactly did it fucking steal, and how does it negatively impact them?? Imo, it doesn't.

RustedSwitch

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Hypothetically, ask AI to write a short story in the style of one of these writers. Don’t tell anyone. Get popular, reduce demand for original writer. People only have so much time, after all.

More likely, they just want to be compensated for their “voice”.

Not advocating for either of these… just thinking about why

beejjorgensen

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Maybe, but it's definitely legal to write a book in the style of an author.