A number of American authors, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco, alleging that the company improperly used their writing to train ChatGPT.

In their lawsuit filed on Friday, Chabon, playwright David Henry Hwang, authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder, and Ayelet Waldman claimed that OpenAI had stolen their works without their consent in order to train ChatGPT to respond to human text prompts.

This lawsuit against OpenAI is at least the third copyright infringement class action that authors have suggested filing.

Authors have also filed lawsuits against companies, including Microsoft, Meta, and Stability AI, for using their work in AI training.

Books, plays, and articles are cited in the latest San Francisco suit as being among the “best examples of high-quality, long form writing,” which is important for ChatGPT training.

The authors argue that ChatGPT can accurately summarise their works and produce language that imitates their writing styles, but claim that their content was included in the training dataset without their consent.