Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of copyright infringement. The publishers claim that their materials were used to train large language models without permission.
According to the complaint, Britannica, which owns the Merriam-Webster dictionary, owns the copyright to almost 100,000 online articles. According to the company, these materials were collected from the Internet and used to train OpenAI’s language models without the copyright holders’ consent.
The lawsuit also states that OpenAI infringes copyright when generating answers that may contain “whole or partial verbatim reproductions” of Britannica materials. Separately, the company points to the use of its articles in the RAG (retrieval augmented generation) system used in ChatGPT. This mechanism allows the model to access the Internet or other databases to retrieve updated information when responding to a user’s query.
Britannica also claims that ChatGPT creates responses that can replace the publishers’ original content.
Britannica’s lawsuit is part of a broader wave of lawsuits that publishers and authors are filing against OpenAI for using their materials to train artificial intelligence models. Similar lawsuits have previously been filed by The New York Times, Ziff Davis (owner of Mashable, CNET, IGN, PCMag, and other media outlets), and more than a dozen newspapers in the United States and Canada. Among them are the Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Sun Sentinel, Toronto Star, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.