Encyclopaedia Britannica is suing ChatGPT creator OpenAI over allegations that the AI firm used its copyrighted material to train its large language models.
In a complaint filed with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Britannica accuses OpenAI of massive copyright infringement that harmed its business.
Britannica argues that OpenAI copied and used 100,000 of its copyrighted online articles without permission to train AI models, feed retrieval-augmented generation systems and generate answers to users.
“ChatGPT thus receives an input, such as a user query, retrieves relevant copied content, such as Plaintiffs’ copied content obtained through the RAG system, combines the original input with the retrieved content to provide context to the LLM; and provides the combined data to the LLM, which was trained on Plaintiffs’ copied content and then generates a natural-language response.”
According to Britannica, OpenAI’s alleged actions are causing business harm through revenue theft. The firm says AI is driving traffic away from its websites, reducing subscriptions and ad revenue and acting as a direct substitute for its content.
“By copying Plaintiffs’ copyrighted content and using it to create substitutes for visiting Plaintiffs’ websites, Defendants are misappropriating substantial advertising and subscription revenue opportunities that belong rightfully to Plaintiffs as the creators and owners of the copyrighted works.
OpenAI’s latest valuation at $730 billion and success at raising funds of over $100 billion are indicative of the potentially massive illegal transfer of revenue from original content creators like Plaintiffs to Defendants.”
Britannica is asking the court to order OpenAI to pay for statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits and other remedies permitted by law.
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