OTTAWA: Canada's biggest news organisations on Friday (Nov 30) sued OpenAI, accusing it of using their articles without permission to help train its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT in a case that could cost the American company billions.

Media including The Globe and Mail newspaper and public broadcaster CBC accused OpenAI of breaching copyrights by "scraping large swathes of content" and profiting from the use of this content, according to a statement.

This was done without the permission of or compensation for the news organisations, which are seeking C$20,000 per article they claim was illegally scraped and used to train ChatGPT.

This could put the total value of the claim in the billions of dollars.

"Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies' journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It's illegal," the coalition said.

An OpenAI spokesperson responded to the lawsuit saying that its chatbox is trained on publicly available data "grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation."

The company also collaborates with news publishers, the spokesperson added.

The lawsuit is the first by Canadian media against OpenAI.

The organisations — which also include Postmedia, The Canadian Press and Torstar, the parent of the Toronto Star newspaper, according to legal documents — are seeking an injunction to stop the San Francisco-based company's ongoing and future "unauthorised misappropriation" of their work.

"We will not stand by while tech companies steal our content," Torstar chief executive Neil Oliver reportedly wrote in a memo to staff shortly after the court documents were filed.

Generative AI caught the world 's attention with OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in late 2022.

The technology can produce videos, pictures or written works quickly, drawing from available content to answer demands expressed in everyday language.

Publications such as the New York Times have filed lawsuits to defend their content, while some news organisations have opted to make licensing deals.

— AFP