The Bookseller - News - Martin, Grisham and Picoult among 17 authors to file AI lawsuit

Rachel Geman, a partner with Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel for the plaintiffs and the proposed class, stated: "Without the plaintiffs' and the proposed class' copyrighted works, the defendants would have a vastly different commercial product. The defendants' decision to copy authors' works, done without offering any choices or providing any compensation, threatens the role and livelihood of writers as a whole."

Scott Sholder, a partner with Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard and co-counsel for the plaintiffs and the proposed class, added: "The plaintiffs don't object to the development of generative AI, but the defendants had no right to develop their AI technologies with unpermitted use of the authors' copyrighted works. The defendants could have ‘trained' their large language models on works in the public domain or paid a reasonable licensing fee to use copyrighted works."