George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and other major authors sue OpenAI, alleging "systematic theft"

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is facing a lawsuit from bestselling writers including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and Elin Hilderbrand that claims the company fed their books into its "large language models" allegedly violating their copyrights and engaging in "systematic theft on a mass scale."

The suit was filed in the Southern District of New York on Tuesday on behalf of the Authors Guild and 17 noted writers, including Scott Turow, Jodi Picoult, David Baldacci, Michael Connelly and George Saunders. OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The complaint is the latest legal challenge facing OpenAI over the data it collects and uses to create the algorithm that underpins ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool that can answer questions and write text in sophisticated language that mimics how a human would respond. To create these AIs, companies like OpenAI rely on large language models, or LLMs, that are fed massive amounts of text and data.