Seventeen authors have joined a new lawsuit alleging ‘systematic theft on a mass scale’ by the program

John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George RR Martin are among 17 authors suing OpenAI for “systematic theft on a mass scale”, the latest in a wave of legal action by writers concerned that artificial intelligence programs are using their copyrighted works without permission.

In papers filed on Tuesday in federal court in New York, the authors alleged “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights” and called the ChatGPT program a “massive commercial enterprise” that is reliant upon “systematic theft on a mass scale”.