AI Is Coming: George R.R. Martin Is Suing The Makers Of ChatGPT After A Fan Used It To Finish The Final Two Books Of "A Song Of Ice And Fire"
Jeff Kravitz. Getty Images.Winter Is Coming- 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 written 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 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.
Look I'm a writer, which definitely feels like an insult to real writers that write novels instead of smut blogs. Regardless, I fully support everyone else trying to grind a paycheck click clacking on keyboards all day long instead of ripping a 20 second TikTok, going viral, then cashing in on a bazillion dollars. I also don't want to see our future robot overlords copying off our papers then making stories on their own using the voice we created, which is essence will be taking errrrrr jerrrrbs!
But George R.R. Martin getting in on this lawsuit pisses me off by the old gods and the new. It's one thing for AI to take the pen out of your hand then running with it. It's quite another if you keep telling people you are still using that pen to write the final two books of a saga the entire world fell in love with yet haven't finished after MORE THAN A DECADE WRITING. It's not like Double R has been grinding away behind his giant MS-DOS machine nonstop.
He has been galavanting around red carpets in his little turtle hat, getting spinoffs to the original Thrones greenlit, and occasionally blogging about how much the Giants suck despite that being my corner, to which I respond with a gif of a show that is higher than Thrones on my all-time power rankings due to the final season from hell.
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Hell, we had a motherfucking GLOBAL PANDEMIC where nobody could leave their houses and there still isn't a hint of the Winds of Winter in the forecast despite George quarantining on a remote island.
So while I appreciate all the entertainment George R.R. Martin has given us, at some point he has to shit or get off the pot so the supercomputers that will take over the planet that finish the books before mankind is destroyed by said supercomputers. Which is why I am giving George until New Year's Day 2025 to at least finish The Winds of Winter or else I am finishing them myself with the assistance of ChatGPT. I feel like 15 months is a fair amount of time to finish a book that should be almost finished, it'll take me about that long to figure out how to use even the most basic functions of ChatGPT, and I figure the second season of House of the Dragon will be wrapping around that time.
Anyway, those are my terms George. Do with them what you please since I know you are more likely to be reading this blog than writing the goddamn books. But just know that I will not only cuck you as the author of A Song Of Ice And Fire but also as the bearded fat man with the little cap.
By the way no matter who ends up writing the ending to the books, we can all agree that Bran is the rightful King of Westeros and everyone that disagrees can suck the Branwagon's proverbial dick.