Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the AI company violated copyright laws by using nearly 100,000 of their articles without permission to train its language models.
According to the lawsuit, Britannica alleges that OpenAI scraped their online articles to train its large language models (LLMs) and generated outputs that contained substantial reproductions of their content. The lawsuit also accuses OpenAI of falsely attributing made-up content to Britannica, which the publishers say has impacted their revenue and reputation.
This legal action follows similar copyright concerns raised by other publishers and writers, including The New York Times and Ziff Davis, against OpenAI. The lawsuit raises questions about the boundaries of using copyrighted material for AI training and the implications on content creation and access to reliable information.
Source: TechCrunch