, a number of major Canadian news and media companies have banded together to sue OpenAI over its use of their articles to train large language models.
In a statement about the lawsuit, News Media Canada president Paul Deegan argued that"these artificial intelligence companies cannibalize proprietary content and are free-riding on the backs of news publishers who invest real money to employ real journalists who produce real stories for real people. "They are strip-mining journalism while substantially, unjustly, and unlawfully enriching themselves to the detriment of publishers."
The suit was filed on Friday, and calls for a share of any profits OpenAI made from the use of articles from these companies, an injunction on OpenAI's continued use of any content from them, and damages of up to $20,000 per article used by OpenAI to train its LLMs. Given the dragnet nature of AI model training and the sheer number of individual articles likely in question, OpenAI could be liable for catastrophic damages if the court rules in the media companies' favor.