Ottawa, Canada – A coalition of Canadian media outlets, including The Canadian Press, Torstar, Globe and Mail, Postmedia and CBC/Radio-Canada, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for using news content to train their generative artificial intelligence system ChatGPT.
The media outlets stated in a joint statement issued on Friday that OpenAI regularly infringes copyright by scraping large amounts of content from the press Canadian.
“OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without obtaining permission or compensating its owners,” the statement said.
The plaintiff argues that OpenAI’s practices undermine the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in journalism and that the content is protected by copyright.
“Media companies welcome technological innovations. However, all participants must comply with the law, and any use of intellectual property must be on fair terms,” the statement added.
The Artificial intelligence (AI) Generative can create text, images, videos and computer code based on a simple prompt, but the systems must first study vast amounts of existing content.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
It is the first case of its kind in Canadaalthough there are numerous lawsuits underway in the United States, including a lawsuit by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft.
Some news organizations have chosen to collaborate rather than fight OpenAI signing agreements to be compensated for sharing news content that can be used to train their AI systems.
The Associated Press is among news organizations that have made deals over the past year with OpenAI; others include the Wall Street Journal; New York Post publisher News Corp., The Atlantic; Axel Springer in Germany; Medium Rush in Spain; France’s Le Monde newspaper, and the London-based Financial Times.