Canadian news outlets accuse OpenAI of ‘unauthorized’ scraping to train its generative AI tools like ChatGPT

Several top Canadian news companies have accused ChatGPT creator OpenAI of intentionally ripping off their copyrighted content to train its large language models.

Media companies Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC/Radio-Canada allege in a new lawsuit against OpenAI that the artificial intelligence startup has “engaged in ongoing, deliberate, and unauthorized misappropriation” of their news works.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice and viewed by B-17, accuses OpenAI of violating Canadian copyright laws and “unjustly enriching” itself at the expense of the news media companies.

In response to the lawsuit, an OpenAI spokesperson told B-17 in a statement that its models are “trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation.”

“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,” the spokesperson said.

The news companies alleged in a joint statement that OpenAI “regularly breaches copyright and online terms of use by scraping large swaths of content from Canadian media to help develop its products, such as ChatGPT.”

“OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners,” the statement said. “Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.”

The 84-page lawsuit seeks an undisclosed amount of damages to compensate the media companies for the “wrongful misappropriation” of their works as well as a permanent injunction in order to prevent OpenAI from carrying out “unlawful conduct.”

“Rather than seek to obtain the information legally, OpenAI has elected to brazenly misappropriate the News Media Companies’ valuable intellectual property and convert it for its own uses, including commercial uses, without consent or consideration,” the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit follows a flurry of other lawsuits previously filed by authors, visual artists, news outlets, and computer coders against AI companies like OpenAI, arguing that their original works were used to train AI tools without their permission.

Other media organizations, including Axel Springer, the parent company of B-17, have partnered with OpenAI and licensed their work for use by the company.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and its largest backer Microsoft for copyright infringement late last year.