A company that represents American writers has sued OpenAI for illegally training its popular AI-based chatbot Chatjipity to copy their work.

A group of distinguished authors, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult, George R.R. Martin and Elin Hilderbrand have joined the legal battle against OpenAI, claiming that it infringed their copyright by using their books to train its popular chatbot Chatzipity.

"OpenAI's success and profitability is based on massive copyright infringement without a word of permission or the slightest compensation to copyright owners," the complaint said.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, says that while OpenAI doesn't publicly disclose what stuff it uses to train its models, the company has admitted that it used copyrighted material.

The complaint also states that OpenAI's Chatjipity is capable of producing book summaries that include details not available in reviews or elsewhere online, suggesting that the underlying program was loading the books in their entirety.

An OpenAI spokesperson said the company respects authors' rights and is "in productive discussions with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild."

Society of Authors executive director Mary Rosenberger said authors "must be able to control whether and how their works are used by generative artificial intelligence" to "preserve literature".

In addition to Microsoft-backed OpenAI, similar lawsuits are pending against Meta Platform and Stable AI over data used to train their AI systems.