Canada’s biggest news organizations sued OpenAI, accusing it of using their articles without permission to help train its artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT in a case that could cost the American company billions.
Media including The Globe and Mail newspaper and public broadcaster CBC accused OpenAI of breaching copyrights by “scraping large swaths of content” and profiting from the use of this content, according to a statement.
This was done without the permission of or compensation for the news organizations, which are seeking $14,700 per article they claim was illegally scraped and used to train ChatGPT.
This could put the total value of the claim in the billions of dollars.
“Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their commercial gain is not. It’s illegal,” the coalition said.
An OpenAI spokesperson responded to the lawsuit saying that its chatbox is trained on publicly available data “grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation”.
The company also collaborates with news publishers, the spokesperson added.
The lawsuit is the first by Canadian media against OpenAI.
