Publishers tell court AI sequels threaten Martin's Winds of Winter

The Association of American Publishers, the Independent Book Publishers Association, the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, and the Copyright Clearance Center filed a joint amicus brief supporting author, book publisher, and news publisher plaintiffs in In Re: Open AI Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, Publishers Weekly reported. The plaintiffs are asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to grant summary judgment against OpenAI and Microsoft's fair use defense, after the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs filed for summary judgment in September.

The brief argues that OpenAI illegally trained on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series as part of a "research mission" to develop an LLM capable of writing the last two books in the series, and states that ChatGPT has already generated sequels that are substitutes for Martin's forthcoming The Winds of Winter, according to Publishers Weekly. The brief also cites a Microsoft employee who concluded that authors "who were no longer able to sell their books because there are so many substitutive AI-generated books out there" were economic victims of large language models.

AAP president and CEO Maria A. Pallante said in a prepared statement that "the failure of AI companies to pay for the works they need is an unjustified and damaging departure from the operation and integrity of the law," and that authors and publishers have become "integral to producing Open AI's large language models," which without guardrails and financial participation "have the power to diminish both the value of the works copied and the long-term viability of human authorship more generally."