Dictionary sues OpenAI | TechCrunch

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging… complaint That the AI ​​giant had committed “serious copyright infringement.”

Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster, holds the copyright to nearly 100,000 online articles, which were copied and used to train LLMs in OpenAI without permission, the publisher alleges in the lawsuit.

Britannica also accuses OpenAI of violating copyright laws when it creates output that contains “full or partial verbatim copies” of its content and when the AI ​​lab uses its articles in ChatGPT’s RAG (Boost generation recovery) Workflow. OpenAI’s RAG tool is how LLM scans the web or other databases for newly updated information when responding to a query. Britannica also claims that OpenAI violates the Lanham Act, a trademark law, when it generates fabricated hallucinations and falsely attributes them to the publisher.

“ChatGPT deprives web publishers like Britannica of revenue by creating responses to user inquiries that replace and directly compete with content provided by publishers like Britannica,” the lawsuit said. Britannica also claims that the ChatGPT hallucination jeopardizes “the public’s continued access to high-quality, trustworthy information online.”

Britannica joins a number of other publishers and writers in pursuing legal action against OpenAI over copyright issues. the New York Times, Zev Davis (owner of Mashable, CNET, IGN, PC Mag, and others), and more than a dozen Newspapers Throughout the United States and Canadaincluding the Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Sun Sentinel, Toronto Star, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI.

A Similar lawsuit in Britannica Against confusion is still pending.

There is no strong legal precedent determining whether the use of copyrighted content for LLM training constitutes copyright infringement. But in One particular exampleAnthropic successfully convinced federal judge William Alsup that this use case — using content as training data — is transformative enough to be legal. However, Allsop said Anthropic violated the law by illegally downloading millions of books, rather than paying for them, which secured a $1.5 billion class action settlement for affected writers.

OpenAI did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment before publication.