George R.R. Martin And Other Authors Making Progress In Case Against OpenAI
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Sam Altman's company, OpenAI, may be facing a financial hit as the lawsuit filed against it by a coalition of authors, including George R.R. Martin, progresses. There are now three theories at the center of this suit. According to The Hollywood Reporter, two infringement theories have been advanced by a federal judge, meaning that the separation of these arguments is recognized and is allowed to move forward independently of one another. While OpenAI reportedly attempted to argue against this action, they were overruled. One of these theories is that training their Large Language Models (LLMs) on copyrighted works would constitute infringement.
The second theory centers around downloading pirated copies of books, whether they were used to train their models or not, as this is illegal either way. There is precedent for this argument already, seen in Bartz v. Anthropic. This case favoured AI company Anthropic for the content they legally obtained and paid for, but separately judged them for written works obtained through reportedly pirated sources; in the end, the company agreed to pay out $1.5 billion in a settlement for the allegedly pirated training content, as well as destroying said content and materials made with it. Considering the legal precedent and its relation to the case in question, there is a fair chance that it will be of assistance during litigation.
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The third theory that the plaintiffs are utilizing is that ChatGPT’s generated responses can plagiarize and infringe upon the content of books that it has used for training; essentially, the program is ripping off the content it trains upon, spitting it out under the guise of being original. This is based on evidence that ChatGPT would allegedly present content related to Martin’s work when prompted.
This case is crucial because it will help set a precedent for artists’ and authors’ cases against AI development corporations. So long as one of their arguments receives a verdict in their favour, it will be a point of reference for future cases of similar content. Any case’s outcome will set the tone for the future, similar to Bartz v. Anthropic and its relevance to Martin and co.’s lawsuit. This suit has not reached the stage of determining which arguments will move on to trial; once it does, the tone will truly be set for which direction it will lean in favour of.
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Source(s): THR, AV Club, NPR, Kilpatrick
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