A group of Canadian news and media companies filed a lawsuit Friday against OpenAI, alleging that the ChatGPT maker has infringed their copyrights and unjustly enriched itself at their expense.
The companies behind the lawsuit include the Toronto Star, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Globe and Mail, and others who seek to win monetary damages and ban OpenAI from making further use of their work.
The news companies said that 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 behalf of the News Media Companies and their journalists, editors, and staff.”
The companies wrote in their suit that “rather than seek to obtain the information legally, OpenAI has elected to brazenly misappropriate the News Media Companies’ valuable intellectual property and convert it for its own uses, including commercial uses, without consent or consideration.”
OpenAI is also facing copyright lawsuits from The New York Times, New York Daily News, YouTube creators, and authors including comedian Sarah Silverman.
While OpenAI has signed licensing deals with publishers such as The Associated Press, Axel Springer, and Le Monde, the companies behind the new suit said they have “never received from OpenAI any form of consideration, including payment, in exchange for OpenAI’s use of their 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 hard problems,” and that its models are “trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation.”
“We collaborate closely with news publishers, including in the display, attribution and links to their content in ChatGPT search, and offer them easy ways to opt-out should they so desire,” the spokesperson said.
This new lawsuit comes shortly after Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism published a study finding that “no publisher — regardless of degree of affiliation with OpenAI — was spared inaccurate representations of its content in ChatGPT.”