Game of Thrones author George RR Martin is winning a legal battle against OpenAI for copyright infringement of his work.
A Manhattan federal judge wrote, “A reasonable jury could find that the allegedly infringing outputs are substantially similar to plaintiffs’ works,” prompting the two-year-old lawsuit to proceed.
The suit was filed initially in 2023 and coordinated by a group called the Authors Guild, which includes various authors concerned with the relationship between AI on original works of literature.
“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 2023. “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.”
An AI summary produced by ChatGPT was found to resemble Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire”:
“Members of the Night’s Watch, a sworn brotherhood tasked with defending the realm from threats beyond the Wall (a giant ice structure in the North), are attacked by mysterious and deadly creatures known as the White Walkers, thought to be mere legends,” the text states.
According to the Daily Wire, it was deemed by the court that readers could “easily conclude that this detailed summary is substantially similar” to Martin’s work, and “conveys the overall tone and feel of the original work by parroting the plot, characters and themes of the original.”
