George R.R. Martin (Wikipedia)
Sam Altman’s OpenAI is in the hot seat as the company is being sued by none other than Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen and more. The suit, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and brought by the Authors Guild, alleges that the AI driven editing and rewriting tech provided by OpenAI is guilty of “systematic theft on a mass scale” since it helps people reuse their copyrighted materials without permission.
This is just another example of writers fed up with the entire artificial intelligence revolution. It used to be that labor unions would go on strike against manufacturers because they were replacing workers with robots and other automated machinery. There was even a famous episode of the “Twilight Zone’ where workers at a plant are, one by one, replaced by robots as the head of the company calls this progress. At the end of the episode, of course, he himself is replaced by a robot.
Fear of being replaced and even wiped out by human like robots someday has been a consistent theme in much of science fiction like “The Terminator.” But people never thought that AI would come along and first take away the jobs of artists and creators like writers. That is why the Writers Guild of America, followed by the Screen Actors Guild, is striking against the Hollywood studios. The studios had already begun to replace some writers with computer programs and even actors could be replaced with new special effects and AI that could make lifelike computer generated ones.
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But the case against OpenAI is different. Here the writers are complaining about how AI can be used to “steal” their work. AI could, for example, take a novel and rewrite it in such a way that it could even be republished as a different book entirely or be used as a screenplay for a movie without paying any royalties to the author. In this respect, the publishing houses should be siding with the Authors Guild. Unfortunately, many are part of conglomerates that also own the studios.
The plaintiffs in this case charged that the ChatGPT program is a “massive commercial enterprise” and that it is guilty of “systematic theft on a mass scale.” They also charged that OpenAI is guilty of the “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights”
“The success and profitability of OpenAI are predicated on mass copyright infringement without a word of permission from or a nickel of compensation to copyright owners,” says the suit.
“It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement. “Great books are generally written by those who spend their careers and, indeed, their lives, learning and perfecting their crafts. To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI.”
OpenAI responded to the suit in a statement saying that the firm respects “the rights of writers and authors, and believe they should benefit from AI technology.”
“We’re having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild, and have been working cooperatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI,” said OpenAI. “We’re optimistic we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to work together to help people utilize new technology in a rich content ecosystem,”
“We’re having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild, and have been working cooperatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI. We’re optimistic we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to work together to help people utilize new technology in a rich content ecosystem,” the statement reads.
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot that was launched by OpenAI in November 2022. Chatbot.com explains that a chatbot is software that simulates human-like conversations with users via chat. Its key task is to answer user questions with instant messages.
It is just one of many such programs available, with major firms like Google and Facebook engaged in a race to develop the most advanced AI programs. But we are still very far away from the possibility of machines taking over the world as they do in dystopian sci-fi movies like “The Terminator” and “The Matrix.”
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