A group of Canadian news and media companies. filed a lawsuit Friday against OpenAI, alleging that the maker of ChatGPT infringed its copyright and was unjustly enriched at its expense.
The companies behind the lawsuit include the Toronto Star, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Globe and Mail and others seeking monetary damages and to ban OpenAI from continuing to use their work.
The news companies said OpenAI has used content scraped from their websites to train the large language models that power ChatGPT, content that is “the product of immense time, effort and cost on the part of news media companies and its journalists, editors, and staff.”
The companies wrote in their lawsuit that “rather than seeking to obtain the information legally, OpenAI has chosen to blatantly appropriate valuable intellectual property from news media companies and convert it to its own uses, including commercial uses, without consent or consideration.” “.
OpenAI also faces copyright lawsuits from The New York Times, New York Daily News, YouTube creators, and authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman.
While OpenAI has signed licensing agreements with publishers such as The Associated Press, Axel Springer and Le Monde, the companies behind the new lawsuit said they “have never received from OpenAI any type of consideration, including payment, in exchange for the use of OpenAI of your Works.”
An OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement that ChatGPT is used by “hundreds of millions of people around the world… to improve their daily lives, inspire creativity, and solve difficult problems” and that its models are “trained on publicly available data , based on public data.” on fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair to creators and support innovation.”
“We work closely with news publishers, including on display, attribution, and links to their content in ChatGPT search, and offer them easy ways to opt-out if they wish,” the spokesperson said.
This new lawsuit comes shortly after Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism published a study that found that “no publisher, regardless of the degree of affiliation with OpenAI, was spared inaccurate representations of their content in ChatGPT.”