Major news organizations in Canada sue OpenAI for using news articles to train ChatGPT

A coalition of Canada’s major news organizations, including the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, Canadian Press and CBC, is suing tech giant OpenAI, claiming the company is illegally using news articles to train its ChatGPT software.

It’s the first time all of a country’s major publications have come together in litigation against OpenAI. The suit, filed in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice seeks punitive damages, disgorgement of any profits made by OpenAI from using the news organizations’ articles and an injunction barring the tech firm from using any of the news articles in the future.

“OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners,” and claim that OpenAI “regularly breaches copyright” by using content from Canadian media outlets for products such as ChatGPT, the media companies wrote in a statement.

Meanwhile, in a statement emailed to CBC News, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company’s models are trained on data that is publicly available and said the company is “grounded” in international copyright principles.

Tech critics also point out a lawsuit, filed against the tech company in late December 2023 by the New York Times. At the time, OpenAI had said it respected the rights of content creators and owners and was committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models.

The complaint filed in a Manhattan Federal Court stated the “defendants seek to free-ride on the Times‘ massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.” (Related: Federal judge DISMISSES lawsuit filed by news outlets against OpenAI.)

Tech leaders, academics and engineers warn AI could be a global threat

More than 350 tech leaders, academics and engineers – the people who best understand AI – have signed a statement warning AI could be a global threat to humanity on the scale of pandemics and nuclear war. Making matters worse is that OpenAI had potentially erased search results that the newspaper may need for its case.

Media and technology researcher Richard Lachman noted that companies like OpenAI claim using publicly available news articles to train artificial intelligence isn’t off base.

“The argument of the companies is, ‘We’re essentially reading the news that was on a public website. That’s not illegal. A human can read the news,'” said Lachman, an associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University‘s RTA School of Media.

“Of course, companies push back and say, ‘You’re not reading the news, you are scraping information. And that’s against our terms of service,'” added Lachman.

Lachman compared the situation to a recent offer from a major book publisher to pay authors $2,500 to use their work in training artificial intelligence, pointing out that companies realize there is money at stake when content is used by technology companies. He added, “Clearly, there’s value. The question is, what is that value? I don’t know exactly how that calculation happens.”

Fair dealing does not include a category for training AI said intellectual property lawyer Gaspard Petit. “So you can do your own [artificial intelligence] model, do your own research, but then if you start building a business around it you’re out of that exception,” said Petit.

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Watch as ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI is being sued for allegedly secretly scraping 300 billion words.

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Sources are:

TheStar.com

CBC.ca

Brighteon.com