Canadian media and information companies have filed a complaint against OpenAI, claiming that the AI chatbot’s creation has violated their intellectual property rights and unfairly profited from their work.
Canadian media giants, including the Toronto Star, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Globe and Mail, seek financial compensation and an injunction to prevent OpenAI from utilizing their content in future applications.
The information corporations disclosed that OpenAI leveraged scraped content from their websites to train massive language models powering ChatGPT – a treasure trove of “immense time, effort, and value” created by the information media firms’ journalists, editors, and staff.
The companies claimed that “it is more expedient to pilfer their intellectual property than to acquire it legally; OpenAI has deliberately misappropriated the Information Media Firms’ invaluable intellectual property and repurposed it for its own commercial gain, including industrial applications, without consent or compensation.”
OpenAI may face copyright infringement lawsuits from various news outlets, including New York Daily News, Every Day Information, and others.
While OpenAI collaborates with publishers such as The Associated Press, Axel Springer and Le Monde, the companies behind the mentioned joint venture revealed that they have “never received any compensation, including payment, from OpenAI in exchange for OpenAI’s utilization of their works.”
An OpenAI spokesperson announced that ChatGPT is empowering “millions of individuals globally” to enhance their daily lives, foster creativity, and tackle complex challenges.
The company collaborates meticulously with information providers, incorporating relevant attribution and hyperlinks to their content within ChatGPT’s search functionality; additionally, it offers straightforward opt-out procedures for those who wish to do so, as stated by a company spokesperson.
A recent lawsuit has been filed following the revelation by Columbia College’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism that “not a single writer, regardless of their affiliation with OpenAI, was exempt from inaccurate portrayals of their work on ChatGPT.”
