The author of the Game of Thrones series of books is among a group of 17 writers who have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the Microsoft-backed company of using their copyrighted novels to train its popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.   

The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed late on Tuesday by the Authors Guild representing 17 writers, including Jodi Picault, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham and George RR Martin.

In the filing, the authors said OpenAI copied their works “wholesale, without permission or consideration” and fed them into its chatbot. In doing so, they claim OpenAI endangered their ability to make a living off their work, as ChatGPT allows anyone to generate texts that they “would otherwise pay writers to create”. 

“These algorithms are at the heart of [the d]efendants’ massive commercial enterprise,” the document reads. “And at the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale...