AI continues to be a thorn in the side of modern entertainment media. More and more creatives across the mediums are taking a stand against it. Recently, Sarah Silverman and other authors filed lawsuits against OpenAI and ChatGPT for scanning and using their books without consent. “Game of Thrones” creator George RR Martin has joined the ranks of many authors suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. Martin is joining other authors like John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen in taking a stand against the illegal copying of their works to teach AI.
The Author’s Guild and 17 authors of note filed the lawsuit on September 20th. According to the suit, OpenAI has violated the laws of copyright and “copied plaintiffs’ works wholesale, without permission or consideration” and fed the copyrighted material into large language models (or LLMS), which are “algorithms designed to output human-seeming text responses to users’ prompts and queries.”
It goes on to state that it’s a direct endangerment of an author’s ability to make a living. It allows those without the learned skill and experience of writing novels to cheaply generate words that aren’t their own. Words that technically belong to the authors from which this words were taken. This also makes plagiarism a thousand times easier than before. In short, it’s a danger to authors and writing mediums.
No Compensation, Only Stolen Works
Franzen added in a statement, “Generative AI is a vast new field for Silicon Valley’s longstanding exploitation of content providers. Authors should have the right to decide when their works are used to ‘train’ AI. If they choose to opt in, they should be appropriately compensated.”
The plaintiffs for the suit are hoping for it to be filed as a class action suit, along with a permanent injunction prohibiting the use of their works in AI models. Of the things being made a stand against, AI is a danger to all mediums, and serves only to cheapen the works made by human hands or minds. So it’s nice to see the work being done to try and treat it as the theft it is.
