Sylvia Day
Romance Novelist
The multimillion-selling author of the Crossfire series is a named plaintiff in Authors Guild v. OpenAI, the landmark class action accusing ChatGPT’s maker of training on authors’ books without permission.
In her words
At the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale.
Biography
Sylvia Day (born 1973) is one of the world’s bestselling romance novelists. A former Russian linguist for U.S. Army Intelligence, she turned to fiction and broke out globally with the Crossfire series — beginning with “Bared to You” (2012) — which has sold tens of millions of copies in more than 40 languages.
Suing OpenAI
On September 20, 2023, Day joined the The Authors Guild and sixteen fellow writers — including John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and George R.R. Martin — as named plaintiffs in a class-action copyright suit against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleges the company copied their books wholesale from pirate repositories to train GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, without permission or payment, calling the practice “systematic theft on a mass scale.” Microsoft was added as a defendant that December.
Plaintiffs don’t object to the development of generative AI, but Defendants had no right to develop their AI technologies with unpermitted use of the authors’ copyrighted works.
Romance is the publishing category many observers consider most exposed to AI-generated imitation — high volume, fast release cycles, and devoted readerships have already attracted machine-written knockoffs on self-publishing platforms. Day’s presence among the plaintiffs put commercial fiction’s biggest earners, not just literary novelists, behind the case, which was consolidated with related author suits into multidistrict litigation against OpenAI in 2025.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/sylvia-day