Toronto: A coalition of Canada’s biggest news organisations is suing OpenAI, maker of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, accusing the company of illegally using their content in the first case of its kind in the country.
Five of the country’s major news companies, including the publishers of its top newspapers, newswires and the national broadcaster, filed the joint suit in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Friday morning.
While this is the first such lawsuit in Canada, it is similar to a suit brought against OpenAI and Microsoft in the United States in 2023 by The New York Times, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.
In response to the Canadian lawsuit, a spokesperson for OpenAI said, “We have not yet had the opportunity to review the allegations,” but added “our models are trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation.”
The Canadian outlets, which include the Globe and Mail, are seeking what could add up to billions of dollars in damages. They are asking for 20,000 Canadian dollars, or $14,700, per article they claim was illegally scraped and used to train ChatGPT. They are also seeking a share of the profits made by what they claim is OpenAI’s misuse of their content, as well as for the company to stop such practices in the future. “OpenAI regularly breaches copyright and online terms of use by scraping large swathes of content from Canadian media to help develop its products, such as ChatGPT,” the news organisations said.
“OpenAI’s 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,” they added. “Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.”