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George R.R. Martin and a cohort of other authors have taken OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, to court – and, so far, they're winning.
Things have taken a positive turn for Martin and the other plaintiffs (i.e. the people suing OpenAI) because two new theories of infringement have been advanced against the tech giant. That means the plaintiffs now have three different ways of winning the case. The damages awarded for copyright infringement could reach up to $150,000.
The first argument is that using copyrighted books to train AI models counts as infringement, while a newer one relates to books being pirated from shadow libraries – some of which are used for training. The third argument is that answers generated by ChatGPT are substantially similar to the books they're trained on.
Article continues below"The prior class complaints asserted a cause of action for copyright infringement and alleged that OpenAI impermissibly downloaded and reproduced plaintiffs’ books," the judge wrote (via The Hollywood Reporter) of the third claim. "The fact that many of the allegations in the prior class complaints suggested that the ultimate purpose of the reproduction was to train OpenAI’s LLMs is not dispositive."
