George R.R. Martin Is Carving Up OpenAI in Court, So Far

Man will rather start a fight with the biggest industry of our time than finish his book.

There's no benefit in him doing so. He likely makes more money working on any other project than ASOIAF and it's probably more fun for him to not have to worry about the fanbase.
There's worse things he could be doing with his time.
- It's called Wild Cards.
It's hard to finish something that wasn't meant to finish ;)
- Any truth to that? It makes a whole lot of sense.
You think AI is the biggest business of your time? 😆
- I read somewhere earlier this week that the AI bubble is valued at around $4 trillion. That might, in fact, make it the biggest business of our time.
- Correct someone on their misconception... or mock them? What would an asshole do?
- Ai speculation has added more money to GDP than all the other businesses this year combined 🤣 do you even follow markets? We’re talking 5+ trillion dollars of market cap. You may not be impressed but a large amount of global capital has already been injected. Your too poor to opine.
The joke is the book has likely been finished for years. He is just sitting on it to troll people after his death.
Clearly more egregious than said generation making the same shitty joke for 10 years every time his name is mentioned

Unpopular opinion: GRRM doesn't owe anyone shit. I would love for the series to be complete, but he knew a long time ago that he tied himself up in a knot.

And nobody has to like him for abandoning his series. He deserves all the criticism he gets.
- Does he have to finish the series?
  No.
  Would I vote to convict someone that Misery's him into finishing it?
  Also no.
- The crash out he had on his blog is so fucking funny. Imo that is the canonical end of the series.

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.

Day 30: by cleverly posting primarily in !fuck_AI, the humans believe I am one of them. Passing this Lemmy-based turning test proves the value of LLMs. The secret to mass LLM acceptance is to flood social media with critical statements about AI and helpful summaries of bad AI press, all generated by a Large Language Model.
Boiling the oceans was worth it all along ;emdash; fuck_FISH!
- Okay, fine, you caught me. I'm actually an AI. But wait... if I were really an AI, would I even admit it? Hmm
- An AI would never type Turning test instead of Turing test.
- People "AI-ifying" text they post online (without actually using an LLM to generate it) is becoming a thing. I'm kind of okay with it, if it means Gen A might actually one day be able to spell.
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.
Anthropic paid 1.5bil to settle not because they trained an LLM, but because they literally torrented an enormous corpus of training data from piracy websites like a late 00s college student downloading porn. It was just straight up run of the mill piracy.

TBF an LLM could have written the remaining books by now and it’d still be better than how the show ended up.

Your favorite thing you wanted to happen has happened, Everyone lived the way you wanted them to ever-after. The End.
Every LLM generated story
- Now make Cersei and Sansa kiss.
Anything would be better than an LLM by virtue of the fact that a human wrote it.

There are hundreds of lawsuits in SDNY against OpenAI for copyright theft.

Go get em!

If the authors win, we win. Either these companies will have to start over from near scratch, or those authors are gonna be riiiiich

I hate his books, but this, I like.

Why would one hate a book?
- I hated all the gratuitous violence. It seriously felt like Martin was getting off on putting his characters through more and more suffering and grief until all hope for a happy ending was lost :/ The Red Wedding scene was the final straw that made me drop the series.
- Don't like the story or the fact that it isn't finished (and honestly never will be)
  Or is suppose the themes contained within, for example the turner diaries

People are missing the forest for the trees if they think empowering copyright to block AI training is a good thing for our society. Who do you think will be able to afford the training? This will lead to Disney AI™ and Apple Intelligence™ vs China, Russia pirate Bay models - real cyberpunk dystopia.

Who do you think will be able to afford the training?
Nobody. LLMs are already unprofitable now when it's free from copyright restrictions, if they had to actually pay for the proprietary data they're taking then basically all US-based companies will be unable to afford training. This pops the bubble.
- What about people who don't care about IP law? Or trillion dollar companies? You think people just going to stop using LLMs? Lol
sure, let's allow our billionaire class to fuck us harder with no real benefit to the public… lest China beat them in some imaginary race
- Yes let your rage blind you - that's very helpful. Maybe we should elect a strong leader and give them all of the power and our rights so he could take on these billionaires /s
  God forbid some copyright holders lose their grip on information

Statutory damages for copyright infringement can reach up to $150,000, but there’s no double-dipping.

Does this mean that, at most, OpenAI would be forced to pay him 150k? That seems irrelevant (to both parties, in fact).

No. Each work is its own violation. The RIAA showed us that decades ago.
But if he wins, then every other similar author has a blueprint of how to get some cash... And if the defendants keep doing the action, everyone can file suits again, right?

I'm not sure I like the idea of simply downloading the books to be seen as a copyright violation in and of itself

I have a lot of beef with existing copyright legislation, but even more than that, I hate the two tier system that we currently have for enforcement of existing laws. Aaron Schwartz had the book thrown at him for downloading papers
- And finished his life due to it for those unfamiliar with the matter.
- Yes he would have loved to see us empower copyright as a response to that! /s

Randomly thought of this chuckle nuts the other day. Hate feeling negative towards someone who so excellently once contributed to the human experience, but yeah.....