A trade group representing US authors, the Authors Guild, has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of several prominent writers, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult, and George R.R. Martin.

The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI unlawfully trained its chatbot ChatGPT on their works. Similar lawsuits are pending against other generative AI providers, including Meta Platforms and Stability AI, over the data used to train their AI systems.

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OpenAI and other AI defendants have argued that their use of training data scraped from the internet qualifies as fair use under US copyright law. OpenAI stated that it respects authors’ rights and is engaged in productive conversations with creators, including the Authors Guild.

The Authors Guild’s lawsuit claims that the datasets used to train ChatGPT may have included text from the authors’ books taken from illegal online “pirate” book repositories. It also expresses concerns that AI systems like ChatGPT could generate low-quality ebooks, impersonate authors, and displace human-authored books.