17 authors, including John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and George R.R. Martin, sued OpenAI for using their copyright without permission to train its large language models. 

Organised by the Authors Guild, the suit accused OpenAI of 'systematic theft on a mass scale,' and alleged 'flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights'. 

It also labelled ChatGPT a 'massive commercial enterprise' that is reliant upon 'systematic theft on a mass scale.' 

It also claimed that OpenAI's LLMs 'endanger fiction writers’ ability to make a living, in that the LLMs allow anyone to generate - automatically and freely (or very cheaply) - texts that they would otherwise pay writers to create'.

The suit is the latest of many accusing the developers of using copyrighted content to train generative AI systems.