George R.R. Martinauthor of a literary saga Song of Ice and Firefiled a lawsuit against Open AI, the company responsible for ChatGPT. The famous writer and his colleagues have criticized artificial intelligence because they believe it is destroying culture by taking advantage of their own texts. The tool uses their works without paying copyright and without the consent of the authors, which can be a crime.
For this reason, 17 authors have teamed up to file a joint lawsuit in New York federal court. In it, they accuse ChatGPT of “systematic theft on a massive scale.” This artificial intelligence is capable of generating original texts from a gigantic bibliographic material, including millions of books, web pages and other resources. Many of them are also obtained from pirated sites. Organized by the Authors Guild, the writers included in the lawsuit specific examples of fraudulent use of their texts.
One of the most significant is the one that directly affects George R.R. Martin and its franchise. ChatGPT was able to write a prequel to Game of Thronesreceived the title Dawn of the Direwolves. The lawsuit states that the text features “the same characters as Martin’s existing books.” in the saga Song of Ice and Fire“But this is not the only case, since AI can generate countless novels of different genres based on existing books.
“It is imperative that we stop this theft, or we will destroy our incredible literary culture that fuels so many other creative industries in the United States,” Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild, said in a statement. “Great books are written by those who devote their careers and lives to learning and perfecting the craft. If we want to preserve our literature, authors must be able to control whether AI uses their works and, above all, how it does so,” he adds. The claim is already in the hands of the judicial system, which will study the case and make a decision.
George Martin and Hollywood vs. AI
This problem, raised by the Authors Guild, was already discussed by Hollywood screenwriters several months ago. The entire trade union is now on strike. One reason is that studios can indiscriminately use AI to create scripts without paying their workers. Something especially painful given that artificial intelligence only feeds on pre-existing material, which is often impossible to track and detect plagiarism.
Since the strike of the Writers’ Union began on May 2, George R.R. Martin couldn’t develop my new projects Game of Thrones for HBO. The author has several series in development, so he is waiting for a new collective agreement that will better protect the writers. Hollywood actors also went on strike along with them. And among their demands is increased protection against the use of their faces and voices. AI can use them to create replicas without the permission of interpreters.
Source: Hiper Textual
