On Sept. 19, Game of Thrones authors, George RR Martin and John Grisham filed a class-action lawsuit against ChatGPT for illegally using their copyrighted work.

The primary concern of the authors is that the AI could write new works in the style of the authors without their consent or any way to profit from it, a concern that has become more and more prevalent among writers with the rise of AI and the newest developments in the field.

ChatGPT, like all other large language models, learns by analyzing massive amounts of data sourced online. The lawsuit claims that the author’s books were used without their permission to enhance ChatGPT. Open AI, the developers of ChatGPT,  has said that they respect the rights of authors and wish for authors to benefit from AI, despite the fact that the job of an author is one of the easiest to replace with AI. 

“I think AI is definitely a threat to writer’s jobs, however I think we’ll lean into it and it will be used as leverage to supplement human writers and will not fully replace humans.” said English teacher Christopher Brassell when asked what his thoughts on AI replacing human writers were. 

The lawsuit is coming after two other attempts at compensation from AI creators. A lawsuit in July was filed by comedian Sarah Silverman, and an open letter signed by authors Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman also in July, requesting compensation for use of their work in AI. The case argues that ChatGPT was fed data from copyrighted books without the permission of the authors.

The lawsuit also points to a broader concern in the media industry that this technology is displacing human written material. The concern among writers about the power of AI is widespread and certainly a major concern. Writers are the most likely to lose jobs to AI, because of the way AI exists currently, its main program is writing and AI is rather good at it.

Ultimately suing ChatGPT will most likely not make a major difference. If ChatGPT goes down somehow then another big company will come in with their own AI and the same process will repeat itself.

This isn’t the first time ChatGPT has been sued and probably won’t be the last. However, AI is going to keep evolving and it will continue to improve. Only in the coming decade will we see if it is reasonable for writers to fear for their jobs and livelihoods.