A coalition of major Canadian news organizations has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the artificial intelligence company illegally used their articles to train its AI models without permission or compensation.
The lawsuit, filed in Ontario's superior court of justice, includes prominent media companies like the Globe and Mail, Canadian Press, CBC, Toronto Star, Metroland Media and Postmedia. The publishers are seeking C$20,000 ($14,239) for each article allegedly used without authorization - potentially adding up to billions in damages.
According to the legal filing, OpenAI "strip-mined" journalism content from the publishers' websites to develop its GPT language models, which power tools like ChatGPT. The media organizations argue this constitutes unauthorized use of their proprietary content for commercial gain.
"Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies' journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It's illegal," the publishers stated in their complaint.
Beyond monetary damages, the lawsuit seeks an injunction to prevent OpenAI from using the publishers' content in the future, as well as a share of profits derived from the alleged unauthorized use of their articles.
This case adds to OpenAI's mounting legal challenges. The company already faces a similar billion-dollar lawsuit from The New York Times over claims that millions of its articles were used without permission to train AI systems.
OpenAI maintains that its training practices fall under fair use, stating they use publicly available data and offer publishers ways to opt out. "We collaborate closely with news publishers, including in the display, attribution and links to their content in ChatGPT search," an OpenAI spokesperson responded.
A recent precedent may work in OpenAI's favor - in November, a New York federal judge dismissed a comparable lawsuit from Raw Story and AlterNet over similar claims of unauthorized content use.
The outcome of this Canadian lawsuit could have far-reaching implications for how AI companies access and use published content for training their models, potentially reshaping the relationship between AI developers and content creators.