Artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, the owner of AI chatbot ChatGPT, is being sued by Canadian news publishers for unlawful use of its content.
The five news media companies—The Canadian Press, Torstar, Globe and Mail, Postmedia, and CBC/Radio-Canada—filed a lawsuit against the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. They allege that OpenAI breached copyrights by scraping its content in order to train its generative AI models.
“OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content without getting permission or compensating content owners,” the companies said in a joint statement.
Generative AI is able to create written content, images, and videos while also being capable of solving a wide range of problems and tasks. However, in order to do so, training data must first be supplied, which usually consists of existing content largely sourced from the web.
“Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal,” Canadian news publishers added.
On the other hand, OpenAI is defending itself by saying that it uses publicly available data on the basis of “fair use” while following “related international copyright principles.”
“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,” OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement sent to various media.