George R.R. Martin

George R.R. Martin (born 1948) wrote A Song of Ice and Fire, the fantasy saga that became HBO’s Game of Thrones and reshaped television. Decades into the series, two volumes remain unwritten — a fact that became oddly central to his AI lawsuit when ChatGPT was prompted to outline unauthorized versions of them.

Authors Guild v. OpenAI

On September 20, 2023, Martin joined John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, David Baldacci and 13 other writers as named plaintiffs in the The Authors Guild class action against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York. The complaint calls OpenAI’s use of pirated books to train GPT models “systematic theft on a mass scale,” and cites ChatGPT-generated outlines for fake Ice and Fire sequels as evidence of the harm.

Martin himself has been more measured than the filing. At the Glasgow Worldcon in August 2024 he said the plaintiffs “don’t think we’re gonna outlaw AI” — new technology, he noted, is here to stay — and framed the case as forcing the question of what rules should govern training: consent, credit, and income for the authors whose work feeds the models.

The case has survived early motions and was consolidated with related suits; it remains, alongside the New York Times case, one of the defining copyright battles of the generative AI era.