OpenAI sued by Canada’s biggest media outlets

A host of Canadian media companies filed a lawsuit against OpenAI today, alleging “inappropriate and illegal” use of their journalism to power the company’s GPT model, Reuters reports. It’s the latest salvo fired by the media in its fight against AI companies that have scraped large swaths of the open web to train their large-language models.

The suit was filed by several leading Canadian media companies, including the owners of the National Post and Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC/Radio-Canada. The group alleges that OpenAI infringed on its copyrights when training its models, like ChatGPT, without seeking permission or offering compensation.

“OpenAI’s public statements that it is somehow fair or in the public interest for them to use other companies’ intellectual property for their own commercial gain is wrong,” National Post owner Postmedia said in a statement. “Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.”

“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,” OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom said in a statement.

Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.