What just happened? OpenAI being sued over using copyrighted material for its LLM training is far from new, and this latest case is another in which a huge amount of money is being demanded from the AI firm. Several Canadian news and media companies have joined forces to sue Sam Altman's firm for using their articles without permission, and they're asking for C$20,000 ($14,239) per infringement – meaning a court loss could cost OpenAI billions.
The latest case against OpenAI accusing it of using content without permission, attribution, or payment was filed in Ontario's superior court of justice on Friday.
The plaintiffs include the Globe and Mail, the Canadian Press, the CBC, the Toronto Star, Metroland Media and Postmedia. "The defendants have engaged in ongoing, deliberate and unauthorized misappropriation of the plaintiffs' valuable news media works. The plaintiffs bring this action to prevent and seek recompense for these unlawful activities," said the organizations in a statement, via The Guardian.
The suit adds that OpenAI scraped content from the news and media companies' websites, using the proprietary content to develop its GPT models without consent or authorization.
"They are strip-mining journalism while substantially, unjustly, and unlawfully enriching themselves to the detriment of publishers."
"Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies' journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It's illegal."
The suit asks for punitive damages, a share of profits made by OpenAI from using the news organizations' articles, and an injunction barring the company from using any of the news articles in the future. The media firms want C$20,000 for every article that OpenAI used, which would equate to a payout worth billions of dollars.
OpenAI and Microsoft, its biggest investor, are already facing a lawsuit from the New York Times over claims that millions of its articles were used to train and create OpenAI's LLMs. As with the latest case, the publication is demanding billions of dollars.
OpenAI might not be too worried, though. On November 7, a New York federal judge dismissed a similar lawsuit from Raw Story and AlterNet over claims it produced verbatim or nearly verbatim works of journalism "at least some of the time" without providing author, title, copyright, or terms of use information contained in those works.
OpenAI's defense in this case, and all similar cases it faces, is to claim that its models were trained on publicly available data, and that these actions fall under fair use.
"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," an OpenAI spokesperson said.
OpenAI and Microsoft are also facing a lawsuit from Elon Musk. The billionaire wants a preliminary injunction to stop OpenAI from transitioning to a for-profit enterprise. He also alleges that the companies are illegally attempting to monopolize the generative AI market.
OpenAI hit with billion-dollar lawsuit from Canadian publishers over content abuse
