Three digital publishers have sued OpenAI over claims that it stole their copyrighted articles to train ChatGPT in two separate lawsuits filed on Wednesday.

ChatGPT was trained on huge swathes of text scraped from the internet, including lots of journalism. News publishers, however, aren't happy that OpenAI used their articles to train its models without permission or compensation, and the New York Times has already sued OpenAI over the issue.

The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet are the latest media organizations to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement. The Intercept filed one case, and as Raw Story and AlterNet are owned by the same entity it filed the other. The same law firm, Loevy & Loevy, is running both cases. The Intercept has also gone after Microsoft too in its case.

Both lawsuits accuse the defendants of copyright infringement and violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits removing the names of authors and titles of their work to hide IP theft.

"When they populated their training sets with works of journalism, Defendants had a choice: they could train ChatGPT using works of journalism with the copyright management information protected by the DMCA intact, or they could strip it away," the court documents in the case initiated by Raw Story and AltNet state[PDF].

"Defendants chose the latter, and in the process, trained ChatGPT not to acknowledge or respect copyright, not to notify ChatGPT users when the responses they received were protected by journalists' copyrights, and not to provide attribution when using the works of human journalists."

https://www.theregister.com//2024/02/29/openai_copyright_lawsuits/