In 2023, Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin and other authors sued ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, for copyright infringement. Martin, along with John Grisham, David Baldacci, Elin Hilderbrand, Jodi Picoult, and other authors, alleged that the AI company used their works to train its ChatGPT bots without their permission or compensation.Meanwhile, a judge ruled that a class-action lawsuit can be filed. According to a post by the X account @CultureCrave, OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit was denied. On October 28, Judge Sidney Stein ruled the following:“The prior class complaints asserted a cause of action for copyright infringement and alleged that OpenAI impermissibly downloaded and reproduced plaintiffs’ books. 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.”Furthermore, in the ruling, Judge Stein mentioned Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire book series. According to Business Insider, he said that the AI platform generated an idea for one of the books in the series. As a result, this was an instance of copyright infringement. Stein wrote:“A reasonable jury could find that the allegedly infringing outputs are substantially similar to plaintiffs' works.”What did George R.R. Martin say about OpenAI’s alleged copyright infringement?In a 2024 interview with Winter Is Coming, Martin said he did not think they could outlaw the usage of AI. He said:“You can't outlaw new technology. You can try, people have tried through history...but it's here to stay. The question is: what kind of regulations are you gonna have? What rules are there going to be?”However, he noted that if these books are used for training, the authors should be compensated. Speaking about the importance of having rules in place, he said:“If they have no rules, and things like the AI companies are just free to help themselves to anything they want, then I think we got a real problem because, you know, unlike AI authors need to eat and occasionally buy a house to live in and so forth.”David Baldacci and Michael Connelly speak about the issueDavid Baldacci, author of Strangers in Time, spoke to ABC News in 2023, saying:“My son said, ‘Hey Dad. Come over here.’ When he put in a request to ChatGPT and there were three pages. It sounded like a lot of books that I'd written with names of characters that I'd used in the past and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I feel so violated it was like someone had just taken my entire library without my knowing it.”He went on to argue:“If you can automate this, then you can pretty much automate everything and no one will have a reason to get up out of bed anymore and it just feels like an existential threat to everything that makes us human.”Novelist Michael Connelly said this was more like a good fight. He also told Today that when his books were taken, he had no idea. He said ultimately, it was about consent, since their work was being fed to AI. He felt it wasn’t justified that an author takes a year to write a 400-page novel only to have it stolen in just 15 minutes. Previously, OpenAI released a statement, saying they respected the rights of the authors and had been working to look into the matter.Also Read: David Brian Pearce sentenced to 146 years in prison over deaths of two women