LogInMedia conglomerate Ziff Davis claims ChatGPT creator has used their works for AI development.
Entering a bizarre battle of gaming journalism versus AI developers, where many would say neither side garners much public sympathy, media conglomerate Ziff Davis, owner of IGN, Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, and more than 40 other media brands, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing ChatGPT creator of copyright infringement.
Filed in the US District Court for the District of Delaware, the lawsuit claims that OpenAI has engaged in copyright infringement, DMCA violations, unjust enrichment, and trademark dilution.
The plaintiff alleges that the AI developer intentionally and knowingly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of articles published by news outlets owned by Ziff Davis, and trained its AI models on this content despite Ziff Davis instructing web crawlers not to scrape its data. Furthermore, the media giant accuses OpenAI of removing copyright management information (CMI) from Ziff Davis' works and then reproducing, distributing, and making them publicly accessible with the CMI stripped.
"OpenAI's actions and violations of law harm Ziff Davis because they substitute OpenAI's LLMs, products, services, and outputs for Ziff Davis's media content and distribution services; usurp Ziff Davis's ability to monetize user interactions through advertising, product sales commissions, and other revenue-producing activities; deprive Ziff Davis of the licensing fees OpenAI should have paid to Ziff Davis; and tarnish Ziff Davis's parent brand and many well-known media brands by falsely attributing to them statements and text that Ziff Davis never published," the suit reads.
In light of these allegations, Ziff Davis has demanded a permanent halt to any activities it deems exploitative of its copyrighted works, the destruction of all OpenAI datasets, models, products, and services trained or built using that content, and financial compensation. In response, OpenAI has taken its usual stance, arguing that the use of publicly available data to train LLMs falls under fair use.
"ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives," OpenAI spokesman Jason Deutrom told The Verge. "Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use."
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