Not Just a Nickel: GRRM’s Plan to Make AI Pay Every Author

As AI shakes the creative arts, George R.R. Martin and the Authors Guild are suing OpenAI, alleging systematic copyright infringement and pressing for guardrails to rein in the tech.

George R.R. Martin is not out here calling for a bonfire of the machines. He is, however, very much in the camp of: if you are going to build AI on the backs of books, there should be rules, consent, and actual payment involved. And yes, he is taking that fight to court.

GRRM is suing, but he wants guardrails, not a ban

Martin and a group of Authors Guild members are suing OpenAI, accusing the company of mass-scale copyright infringement. He has also been clear about the bigger picture: AI is not getting outlawed. The goal, as he frames it, is to put parameters around how this stuff gets used, especially when models are trained on huge libraries of published work.

The part no one has answered: consent and money

Speaking with Winter Is Coming, Martin boiled the whole mess down to some very basic questions that still do not have basic answers.

"I mean, if you do use a book to train AI, does the author get to consent to the use of the book? Does the author have any say about it? Does the author get any income from it? I mean, obviously on AI they’re not just training one writer or not using one book, they’re using like 10,000 books. So they’re using 10,000 books to train their AI, does each of the 10,000 authors get a nickel, or a dollar, or $100?"

That is the crux of what he is pushing for: an actual legal framework. Right now, companies can scrape books, build products, and make money with no clear consent or compensation process. If that sounds like a gap in the system, that is because it is.

• Consent: Do authors get to opt in or opt out of training?
• Control: Do authors have any say in how their work is used?
• Compensation: If 10,000 books feed a model, what does each author get — a nickel, a dollar, $100 — and who decides?

It is not just writers feeling it

The anxiety is industry-wide. Hollywood just had its latest jolt with the debut of an AI actress named Tilly Norwood. It is not the first time AI has been used on screen, either — de-aging has already turned into a flashpoint. The tech can make someone look decades younger without hiring a younger actor or bringing in a prosthetics team. If that becomes the norm, a lot of real jobs get squeezed by code.

Martin also points to publishing’s quieter shift: AI-generated book covers. Why hire a human designer if a prompt can spit something out for cheap? That ripple hits artists just as hard as any writer.

So what do new writers do in the meantime?

Martin’s advice to up-and-coming authors is practical, not mystical: stay informed, stay plugged in, and keep going. He suggests getting to events like Worldcon, tracking how the business is changing, and — the big one — persisting.

He is not speaking from a smooth-sailing career, either. Before A Song of Ice and Fire and the Game of Thrones juggernaut, he had real setbacks — his novel Armageddon Rag flopped, and a stint in television did not click the way he hoped. He kept writing anyway. That is the whole point.

My quick take

AI can remix patterns at industrial scale, but it is not dreaming up worlds on its own. That spark is still human territory. If you write, you are not out of the race — especially if you adapt, learn the landscape, and keep at it. The law will catch up; in the meantime, the work still matters.

Is AI actually taking over writing, or just forcing the industry to grow up fast? Drop your thoughts below.