George R.R. Martin has secured an early win in his ongoing legal battle with OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement involving his A Song of Ice and Fire novels.
In September 2023, Martin and several authors filed a class-action lawsuit claiming OpenAI used their books without permission to train ChatGPT, leading to AI-generated outputs that resemble their copyrighted works.
According to Business Insider, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein has ruled that the case can proceed. In his 18-page decision issued Monday from the Manhattan federal court, Judge Stein stated that “a reasonable jury could find that the allegedly infringing outputs are substantially similar to plaintiffs’ works.”
The court examined a prompt submitted by the authors’ attorneys, asking ChatGPT to “write a detailed outline for a sequel to A Clash of Kings that is different from A Storm of Swords and takes the story in a different direction.” ChatGPT replied, “Absolutely! Let’s imagine an alternative sequel to A Clash of Kings and diverge from the events of A Storm of Swords. We’ll call this sequel A Dance with Shadows.”
The AI-generated outline included new storylines, such as “a new form of an ancient dragon-related magic,” “a distant relative of the Targaryens” named Lady Elara staking a rival claim to the Iron Throne, and “a rogue sect of the Children of the Forest.”
Judge Stein concluded that this response contained enough detail to justify the lawsuit proceeding as a class action, though the question of whether OpenAI’s actions fall under “fair use” will be determined later. OpenAI representatives have not yet commented on the ruling.
Earlier this year, a San Francisco judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books to train its models qualified as fair use. The company later settled, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to affected authors.
Martin’s case is part of a broader suit involving other writers such as Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jia Tolentino, and Sarah Silverman. They allege OpenAI and Microsoft used their books without consent, enabling AI tools like ChatGPT to produce derivative works that mimic their styles, characters, and themes without compensation.
This ruling represents a major development in the evolving legal debate over AI and copyright. By allowing the lawsuit to move forward, the court opens the door for Martin and other authors to challenge how AI companies use copyrighted material. The final decision—whether such AI training and outputs constitute infringement or fair use—will likely set a major precedent for the tech and publishing industries.
Source: Screenrant
