A Battle Of Thrones In The Realm Of Copyright

ChatGPT has composed a detailed outline for a prequel to Game of Thrones, titled "A Dawn of Direwolves", which employs the same characters from George R.R. Martin's existing books in the series "A Song of Ice and Fire". The author is among 16 others reportedly suing the software's owner, OpenAI, for "systematic theft on a mass scale".

The class action lawsuit was organized by the Authors Guild and includes several prominent writers, such as Jodi Picoult and George Saunders. As reported by AP News, the authors allege that the training of the AI software has resulted in "flagrant and harmful infringements" of their registered copyrights. In particular, they claim that ChatGPT was fed text downloaded from pirate e-book repositories and failed to adequately compensate them for their work. OpenAI "could have 'trained' their LLMs [large language models] on works in the public domain" and "could have paid a reasonable licensing fee to use copyrighted works", but did not.