Fan removes AI-written Winds of Winter after being named in George R.R. Martin’s lawsuit

The battle against the robots is on! For pretty much all of 2023, people have been talking about generative AI programs like ChatGPT, which can take a simple prompt and generate coherent, legible responses. Is this the end of writing as a profession? If we want to read a good story, do we need to buy something written by a writer or can we just tell ChatGPT to spin us a yarn and be satisfied?

The jury is still extremely out on the answers to those and many other questions. For instance, there are currently little to no legal frameworks governing the likes of ChatGPT, which works by reading billions of words of text on the internet and identifying patterns. That means it’s very likely absorbing the text of copyrighted material without permission or remuneration, and some authors aren’t happy about that.

To that end, authors like George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen have teamed up to sue ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI, alleging “mass-scale copyright infringement.” To prove up their case, the authors cite instances of ChatGPT being used to write things that it couldn’t write had it not illegally incorporated copyrighted works. For instance, one fan used ChatGPT to write long, voluminous versions of The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, the next two volumes in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. The lawsuit specifically cites this work as part of its case proving up OpenAI’s infringing behavior.

George R.R. Martin and other authors allege “mass-scale copyright infringement” on the part of OpenAI

To that end, the fan who created the AI versions of The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring has taken them down. “I am just now learning that I was mentioned in a legal document pertaining to the OpenAI lawsuit,” reads a message where the books were previously located. “I have removed the project from GitHub. Should any of George R. R. Martin’s representatives wish to reach out, my contact info remains available.”

I don’t think this fan had any ill intentions — I think they were just doing this as an experiment and didn’t plan to make money off these versions or anything — but I also understand the decision to take everything down. Once lawyers get involved, you can’t be too careful.

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