Canada’s leading news organisations have filed a landmark lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the tech giant of exploiting their content without permission to train its popular AI model, ChatGPT.
The lawsuit, filed on Friday in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, demands punitive damages, a share of the profits OpenAI has derived from using their news articles, and an injunction to stop the San Francisco-based company from using their content in the future, reported The Guardian.
The legal action is being brought by prominent Canadian outlets, including The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, CBC, Toronto Star, Metroland Media, and Postmedia.
The lawsuit claims that OpenAI’s use of these news organisations’ articles to train its language model constitutes an illegal appropriation of proprietary content.
In the lawsuit, the media giants claimed that OpenAI has been “deliberately and without authorisation” scraping their websites for valuable news content, which the company has used to develop and improve its GPT models. The news organisations argue that this constitutes a clear violation of intellectual property rights and has allowed OpenAI to unjustly profit.
“These artificial intelligence companies cannibalise proprietary content and are free-riding on the backs of news publishers who invest real money to employ real journalists who produce real stories for real people,” said Paul Deegan, president of News Media Canada.
“They are strip-mining journalism while substantially, unjustly and unlawfully enriching themselves to the detriment of publishers,” he added.
The media groups are seeking up to C$20,000 in damages for each article OpenAI has used without authorisation, suggesting that a favourable outcome could be worth billions of dollars.
The lawsuit also states that OpenAI has knowingly accessed and copied content from news websites to gather the large amounts of text data needed to train its AI models.
They added that this unauthorised use of their work has enabled OpenAI to become one of the most valuable tech firms in the world, currently valued at more than USD 150 billion.
“The defendants have engaged in ongoing, deliberate and unauthorised misappropriation of the plaintiffs’ valuable news media works. The plaintiffs bring this action to prevent and seek recompense for these unlawful activities,” the statement of claim reads.
Although the case is still in its early stages and none of the claims have been tested in court, this lawsuit signals a new front in the ongoing global battle between media companies and tech giants. Several media organisations in the US, including the New York Times, have already filed similar lawsuits against OpenAI, accusing the company of using their content without permission. In addition to the Canadian lawsuit, OpenAI is facing mounting legal challenges from international media outlets.
Meanwhile, in India, news agency ANI (Asian News International) has also sued OpenAI, accusing the company of using its content without permission for commercial purposes. ANI claims that OpenAI’s language models have reproduced its articles verbatim in response to user queries, leading to potential damage to its reputation.
ANI also alleges that OpenAI’s chatbot has falsely attributed fabricated news to the agency, which could spread misinformation and contribute to public disorder.
In a statement, OpenAI said that it “takes great care in our products and design process to support news organisations” and emphasised that it builds its AI models using publicly available data in a manner that is protected by “fair use” principles.
The company further stated that it is actively engaged in discussions with many news organisations globally to find ways to collaborate and work together on these issues.
