The owners of ChatGPT, OpenAI, are being sued by US writers George RR Martin and John Grisham for allegedly violating their copyright in order to train the system.
The HBO television series Game of Thrones was based on the epic novel series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin.
ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) "learn" by evaluating vast amounts of data, which is frequently gathered from the internet.
According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT was made smarter without the authors' consent by using their works.
In a statement, OpenAI stated that it honored writers' rights and that "they should benefit from AI technology."
Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult, and George Saunders are three further well-known authors included in the case.
The Writers Guild, a trade organization in the US that represents the identified writers, has filed the complaint with the federal court in Manhattan, New York.
The petition stated that OpenAI was accused of committing "systematic theft on a mass scale."
A similar lawsuit was filed in July by comedian Sarah Silverman, and that same month, novelists Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman signed an open letter urging AI firms to pay them for utilizing their works.
"We're having fruitful conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild," a spokesman for OpenAI stated. "We've been working cooperatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI." We are certain that we will keep collaborating in ways that are advantageous to both parties.
In part because it could give accurate summaries of the works, the complaint contends that the LLM was fed data from copyrighted books without the authors' consent.
The case also highlighted a larger issue in the media sector: the idea that this technology is "displacing human-authored" material.
The authors of the complaint would first need to establish ChatGPT had copied and reproduced their work, according to Patrick Goold, a reader in law at City University, who told BBC News that while he could commiserate with them, he thought it was unlikely the action would succeed.