Merriam-Webster has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of using its material to train its artificial intelligence models.
The popular American dictionary, which is a subsidiary of Encyclopedia Britannica, filed the lawsuit Friday in Manhattan federal court.
In the complaint, Britannica and Merriam-Webster accuse OpenAI of using its online articles, encyclopedia and dictionary entries to teach the company’s chatbot, ChatGPT, how to respond to human prompts.
The companies argue that ChatGPT has “cannibalized” their web traffic with its AI-generated summaries of their content.
“Defendants’ ChatGPT-based AI products free ride on Plaintiffs’ trusted, high-quality content — made possible through the diligent work of human researchers, writers, editors, and creators — by cannibalizing traffic to Defendants’ websites with AI-generated summaries of Plaintiffs’ own content,” the lawsuit claims.
In the lawsuit, Britannica claims OpenAI unlawfully copied nearly 100,000 of its articles to train its artificial intelligence.
The complaint said that ChatGPT “generates outputs that copy or mimic, sometimes verbatim,” information from their encyclopedia entries, dictionary definitions and other articles, and pushes users who would otherwise visit Britannica’s websites away.
Britannica claims ChatGPT’s copying of their content is “unlicensed and without authorization.” The dictionary company also notes that the “true extent” of how much has been stolen is “uniquely” within OpenAI’s knowledge.
The company also accused OpenAI of infringing its trademarks by implying that it has permission to reproduce its material, as well as wrongfully citing Britannica in false AI “hallucinations.”
Britannica has requested an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a court order blocking the alleged infringement.
OpenAI disputed the claims, saying in a statement: “Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use,” an OpenAI spokesperson said Monday.
The Independent has contacted Britannica for comment.
The lawsuit from Britannica and Merriam-Webster is the latest copyright suit brought against an AI company over the use of their material to train the chatbots.
Last year, a group of book authors reached a settlement with AI company Anthropic after suing the company for copyright infringement.
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