Christina Baker Kline
Novelist
The #1 New York Times–bestselling author of “Orphan Train” is a named plaintiff in Authors Guild v. OpenAI, accusing the company of training ChatGPT on her novels without permission or payment.
In her words
At the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale.
Biography
Christina Baker Kline (born 1964) is an American novelist best known for “Orphan Train” (2013), which spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list and sold millions of copies worldwide, followed by “A Piece of the World” (2017) and “The Exiles” (2020) — historical fiction built on years of archival research.
A named plaintiff against OpenAI
On September 20, 2023, Kline joined the The Authors Guild class action against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York, alongside sixteen writers including George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and John Grisham. The complaint alleges OpenAI downloaded the plaintiffs’ books from pirate repositories and copied them into the training data for GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 — “systematic theft on a mass scale,” in the complaint’s words. Microsoft was added as a defendant in December 2023, and the case was later folded into consolidated multidistrict litigation against OpenAI.
It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.
Kline has not been a fiery public campaigner on AI; her opposition is expressed the way the Guild designed the case — through the courts. As a writer whose bestsellers depend on painstaking historical research, she typifies the mid-list-to-blockbuster authors the Guild argues have the most to lose if machine-generated fiction floods the market trained on their own sentences.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/christina-baker-kline