A collection of bestselling authors, including Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin and legal drama writer John Grisham, has sued ChatGPT developer OpenAI for using their writing to train the artificial intelligence without paying.

The lawsuit, which was filed in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday by the writer's advocacy group known as the Authors Guild, claims that the chatbot uses the works of famous authors to train its answers without providing sufficient compensation for the creators. It's the latest action by creators worldwide to ensure proper compensation as more and more people adopt generative tools like ChatGPT.

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OpenAI "copied Plaintiffs' works wholesale, without permission or consideration … then fed Plaintiffs' copyrighted works into their 'large language models' or 'LLMs,' algorithms designed to output human-seeming text responses to users' prompts and queries," the group argued in the suit. The Authors Guild represents Grisham and Martin, Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Franzen, and several other bestselling authors.

"These algorithms are at the heart of Defendants' massive commercial enterprise," the Authors Guild's filing claims. "And at the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale."

Two authors filed a similar lawsuit in July. The Cabin at the End of the World author Paul Tremblay and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl author Mona Awad argued in their suit that ChatGPT was able to generate "very accurate summaries" of their work due to being trained on them, which they see as a copyright violation.

The AI art generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney were targeted in a January 2023 lawsuit by a series of artists who alleged that the bots had infringed the rights of millions of artists. The suit is "another step toward making AI fair & ethical for everyone," said Matthew Butterick, who represents the affected artists.

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Getty Images also filed a suit against Stable Diffusion's developer to seek compensation for using Getty Images within its database to train the model without consent.

The U.S. Copyright Office established new guidelines in March for whether an AI-generated image could be copyrighted. It ruled that users are not entirely in control of what AI image generators create since they may unintentionally draw on an artist's unique style for its creation. However, they may be culpable if the creator explicitly asks the generator to create an image that resembles a particular artist's style.