Mashable: A group of esteemed American authors, namely Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult, have initiated legal proceedings against OpenAI, accusing the organization of copyright infringement for utilizing their works to train ChatGPT.

The Authors Guild, on behalf of the plaintiffs, filed the lawsuit in the federal court of Manhattan on Tuesday. The lawsuit asserts that OpenAI engaged in the wholesale replication of the plaintiffs' works without obtaining permission or providing any form of compensation. OpenAI then proceeded to input the copyrighted works into their "large language models" (LLMs) or algorithms designed to generate text responses that resemble human language when prompted or queried by users.

This proposed class-action lawsuit is part of a series of legal actions taken against companies responsible for popular generative artificial intelligence tools, including large language models and image-generation models. In July, two authors filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging unauthorized usage of their books to train the company's chatbot.

In February, Getty Images filed a lawsuit against Stability AI, accusing the company behind the viral text-to-image generator of unlawfully copying 12 million of Getty's images for training purposes. Additionally, in January, Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt faced a class-action lawsuit concerning copyright infringement claims related to their AI image generators.

Another proposed class-action lawsuit, filed in November, involves Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI. The lawsuit alleges that these companies scraped licensed code to train their code generators. Numerous other lawsuits pertaining to generative AI are currently in progress.

The Authors Guild's filing emphasizes that these algorithms lie at the core of the defendants' extensive commercial operations, and within these algorithms lies a systematic and widespread act of theft.