A group of American writers, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, have sued OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco, accusing the Microsoft-backed program of misusing their writings to train its popular artificial intelligence-powered chatbot ChatGPIT. has been applied.

Chabon, playwright David Henry Hwang and writers Matthew Clam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman said in their lawsuit Friday that OpenAI copied their works without their permission to teach ChatGPIT to respond to human text prompts.

Representatives for Chaban referred questions about the lawsuit to the authors’ attorneys. Those lawyers and representatives of OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

The lawsuit is at least the third proposed copyright-infringement class action filed by authors against Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Companies including Microsoft, Meta Platform and Stability AI have also been sued by copyright owners over the use of their work in AI training.

OpenAI and other companies have argued that the AI ​​training makes fair use of copyrighted material snatched from the Internet.

ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer application in history earlier this year, reaching 100 million monthly active users in January, before being replaced by Meta’s Threads app.

The new San Francisco lawsuit says works such as books, plays and articles are particularly valuable for training ChatGPTS because they “exemplify the best examples of high-quality, long-form writing.”

The authors alleged that their writings were included in ChatGPT’s training dataset without their permission, arguing that the system could accurately summarize their works and generate text that mimicked their styles. .

The lawsuit requested an unspecified amount of damages and an order to stop OpenAI’s “unlawful and unfair business practices”.