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George R.R. Martin Is Carving Up OpenAI in Court, So Far
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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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So, this is what I understood so far:
A group of authors, including George R.R. Martin, sued OpenAI in 2023. They said the company used their books without permission to train ChatGPT and that the AI can produce content too similar to their original work.
In October 2025, a judge ruled the lawsuit can move forward. This came after ChatGPT generated a detailed fake sequel to one of Martin's books, complete with characters and world elements closely tied to his universe. The judge said a jury could see this as copyright infringement.
The court has not yet decided whether OpenAI's use counts as fair use. That remains a key legal question.
This case is part of a bigger debate over whether AI companies can train on copyrighted books without asking or paying. In a similar case against Anthropic, a court once suggested AI training might be fair use, but the company still paid $1.5 billion to settle.
No final decision has been made here, and no trial date has been set.
Just forget for a second that this has anything to do with AI specifically: I wonder how it could possibly fall under fair use to grind up hundreds of thousands of pieces of copyrighted content, and then use that data to create software that you then profit from.
The question, as I see it, is if simply mashing all this intellectual property together -- and deriving a series of weights for an AI model from that -- somehow makes it not theft simply because all the content is smashed into one big pile of pink goo in which no single piece of content is recognizable.
... Because that is what we do, that is what humans do every single day of our lives. That is why a judge might decide that it is fair use.
You would think OpenAI wouldn't want to set the precedent that AI has the rights of a person, considering how they want AGI to be the slave labour to replace all human workers.