Saw this coming, as did everyone else, including, if you had asked it, ChatGPT.

The motion and brief ask the court to rule that defendants OpenAI and Microsoft infringed on the authors’ copyrights by pirating their works, copying them to train their AI, and trading the books between them as currency, and to reject the defendants’ fair use defense. The defendants also filed their own motions for summary judgement.

This case no doubt builds on the Anthropic settlement, which I’ve written about most recently here.

The plaintiffs’ brief argues that “OpenAI’s GPT models pose an existential threat to those who write and publish books.” The brief describes how, since the release of ChatGPT, “a torrent of AI-generated books of all types” has started flooding the market, threatening to “’substitute’ for the creations of authors.” Not only did OpenAI feed plaintiffs’ books to its models so that the models can regurgitate and create derivatives of the works with simple prompts by anyone in the world, but it also initially downloaded the books from pirate websites and quite literally “built the foundations of its business on mass piracy.”

Most egregiously

As the brief states, “OpenAI’s models are capable of displacing human authors precisely because it exploited their works.”
This harm is here. The publicly-available evidence of market dilution shows a clear trend of “substitution” of human authored works. And public statements by OpenAI’s Head of Model Writing Quality Tarun Gogineni say it all: His “research mission” was to have GPT models write the “last two books of [plaintiff Martin’s] A Song of Ice and Fire” series.

A friend, a serious recreational reader all of her life, told me they were now reading free short stories created by AI. They were pretty good, they said. I might as well retire then, I said. Oh no no no, they said, I still read real books. So let’s run a little poll.

Careful. You hold my future in your hands.

Publisher’s Weekly wrote about the lawsuit here, where they gave a, ah, comprehensive look at OpenAI’s argument.

Upon reading which I hotfooted it over to the dictionary. Yeah, that word means exactly what I thought it meant.

#thiswritinglife Chatter Anthropic authorsguild ChatGPT George R.R. Martin