A group of Canadian news outlets, including CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, Metroland, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press, have filed a joint lawsuit against OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT language model-based chatbot, for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, seeks punitive damages and the payment of profits made by OpenAI from using news articles from these organizations. Additionally, the lawsuit requests an injunction to prevent OpenAI from using their news articles in the future.
This legal action comes following a similar lawsuit by the New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The New York Times accused the tech companies of using millions of articles without permission to train artificial intelligence technologies.
OpenAI has defended its practices, stating that their models are trained on publicly available data and that they collaborate with news publishers to display, attribute, and link to their content in ChatGPT search. The company also offers easy opt-out options for publishers who do not want their content used.
Media and technology researcher Richard Lachman has pointed out that using publicly available news articles to train AI is a contentious issue. Companies like OpenAI argue that it is akin to reading the news, while others claim it is scraping information and goes against terms of service.
The ongoing legal battle between news outlets and OpenAI raises questions about the value of content used by technology companies for training AI models. The outcome of these lawsuits will likely have implications for how AI technologies are developed and the relationship between tech companies and content creators.