A broad coalition of Canada’s major news organizations, including the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC, is suing tech giant OpenAI, saying the company is illegally using news articles to train its ChatGPT software.
[Editor’s note: This site is part of Metroland Media.]
It’s the first time all of a country’s major news publishers have come together in litigation against OpenAI.
The suit, filed in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice Friday morning, seeks punitive damages, disgorgement of any profits made by OpenAI from using the news organizations’ articles, and an injunction barring OpenAI from using any of the news articles in the future.
“Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal,” said a joint statement from the media organizations, which are represented by law firm Lenczner Slaght. None of the allegations contained in the suit have been proven in court.
The suit seeks up to $20,000 in statutory damages per article used by OpenAI, which could put the total value of the suit in the range of billions of dollars.
“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 a statement of claim by the news organizations against OpenAI and several subsidiaries and affiliates.
The suit accuses OpenAI of using articles without the news organizations’ consent to help train ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot which responds to prompts and questions from users.
“To obtain the significant quantities of text data needed to develop their GPT models, OpenAI deliberately ‘scrapes’ (i.e., accesses and copies) content from the News Media Companies’ websites…. It then uses that proprietary content to develop its GPT models, without consent or authorization,” the suit alleges.
The suit follows similar litigation from news organizations around the world seeking compensation from OpenAI for the use of published work in training ChatGPT, one of the most popular consumer software applications ever produced.
OpenAI has already signed licensing agreements with some media organizations. Last July, it signed a licensing agreement with U.S.-based news service The Associated Press.
It has also reached agreements with NewsCorp and Condé Nast.
A suit by the New York Times against OpenAI and partner Microsoft is also underway, with lawyers for the newspaper accusing OpenAI’s engineers of erasing evidence the newspaper’s lawyers had gathered for use in the trial.
OpenAI has also faced litigation from co-founder Elon Musk.
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI was valued at $157 billion (U.S.) after its latest round of fundraising from investors.
