Today, The Authors Guild and seventeen high-profile authors filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
“The Authors Guild serves to protect the literary landscape and the profession of writing. This case is merely the beginning of our battle to defend authors from theft by OpenAI and other generative AI,” said Maya Shanbhag Lang, president of the Authors Guild and a class representative, in a statement. “As the oldest and largest organization of writers, with nearly 14,000 members, the Guild is uniquely positioned to represent authors’ rights. Our membership is diverse and passionate. Our staff, which includes a formidable legal team, has expertise in copyright law. This is all to say: We do not bring this suit lightly. We are here to fight.”
The suit comes after the Authors Guild released an open letter in July 2023 calling on AI companies to protect writers from having their work be used to train AI without their consent and without compensation.
The seventeen authors who are plaintiffs of the suit are David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor LaValle, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow, and Rachel Vail.
“I’m very happy to be part of this effort to nudge the tech world to make good on its frequent declarations that it is on the side of creativity,” Saunders said in the same statement announcing the class-action lawsuit. “Writers should be fairly compensated for their work. Fair compensation means that a person’s work is valued, plain and simple. This, in turn, tells the culture what to think of that work and the people who do it. And the work of the writer—the human imagination, struggling with reality, trying to discern virtue and responsibility within it—is essential to a functioning democracy.”
While the suit focuses on fiction writers, the Authors Guild has also emphasized that their scope is broader than that. “We are pursuing protections and compensation for all writers, from poets to memoirists to biographers,” Lang said in an email to Guild members. “If you write nonfiction, as I do, please know that we have your back. This fight is for authors of every genre.”
Lang went on to emphasize that the Authors Guild is not against AI wholesale. “We recognize that [AI] can be a valuable resource,” she wrote to members. “But it should be a tool human beings wield, not one that is weaponized against us. This suit is really about stopping wholesale theft of our work.”
