April 1 (Reuters) - A group of authors suing OpenAI for

copyright infringement in California failed to convince a New

York federal court on Monday to halt related cases brought in

Manhattan by the New York Times, the Authors Guild and others.

U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein said that the writers,

including Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates and comedian Sarah

Silverman, did not have a strong enough interest in the New York

cases to justify letting them intervene.

The writers had sought to convince the New York court to

dismiss the cases against OpenAI and Microsoft ( MSFT ),

OpenAI's largest financial backer, or move them to California.

The California court rejected a related request last month.

Representatives for the writers, the New York Times, OpenAI

and Microsoft ( MSFT ) did not immediately respond to requests for

comment. A spokesperson for the Authors Guild declined to

comment.

Several groups of copyright owners have sued major tech

companies over the alleged misuse of their work to train

generative artificial-intelligence systems. The authors in the

California case sued OpenAI last summer, accusing it of using

their books without permission to train the AI model underlying

its popular chatbot ChatGPT.

The Authors Guild filed a similar lawsuit in New York in

September on behalf of other writers including John Grisham and

George R.R. Martin. That lawsuit was followed by additional

complaints from nonfiction authors and the Times.

The California authors told Stein that allowing the

"copycat" cases to continue would lead to inconsistent rulings

and waste resources. But Stein on Monday said that the

California and New York cases had "substantial differences."

"More importantly, for the claims that do overlap, the

California Plaintiffs have no legally cognizable interest in

avoiding rulings that apply to entirely different plaintiffs in

a different district," Stein said.