“GAME of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin and other best-selling fiction writers have filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the tech startup of violating their copyrights to fuel its generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT.

The Authors Guild, an organisation representing writers and several novelists including Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult, in its lawsuit accused the California-based company of using their books “without permission” to train ChatGPT’s “large language models”, algorithms capable of producing human-sounding text responses based on simple queries.