By Perla Khattar[1]
On September 19, 2023, George R.R. Martin and other professional fiction writers filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The Plaintiffs alleged that at the heart of Large Language Models (LLMs) exists “systematic theft on a mass scale.”[2] In their complaint, the plaintiffs explained that OpenAI, the maker of the LLM ChatGPT, copied their copyrighted works of fiction without permission and fed the data into LLMs that are carefully programmed to “output human-seeming text responses to users’ prompts and queries.”[3] The authors allege that OpenAI downloaded the manuscripts from pirated eBooks repositories.[4]