Grisham, other legal novelists among authors suing OpenAI for using their copyrighted work
Several legal novelists are among 17 authors joining with the Authors Guild in a proposed class action lawsuit against the artificial intelligence program OpenAI. Image from Shutterstock.
Several legal novelists, including John Grisham and Scott Turow, are among 17 authors joining with the Authors Guild in a proposed class action lawsuit against the artificial intelligence program OpenAI.
The Sept. 19 suit alleges that OpenAI used copyrighted work to train the chatbot ChatGPT, report Reuters, the Associated Press and the New York Times.
The federal suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges “systematic theft on a mass scale.” By copying the plaintiffs’ work, OpenAI makes it possible to “spit out derivative works” that mimic those of the authors, turning their work “into engines of their own destruction,” the suit says.
Other suits by authors and content creators have also been filed against OpenAI and other artificial intelligence providers. Comedian Sarah Silverman is a plaintiff in one of the suits.
Besides Grisham and Turow, authors in the new suit include other legal novelists or lawyers who write fiction. They include David Baldacci, Jodi Picoult and Michael Connelly.
Grisham won the inaugural 2011 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, a contest created by the University of Alabama School of Law and the ABA Journal.
Grisham won a second time in 2014. Connelly was also a winner, while Turow and Picoult were finalists.
