A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI filed by Raw Story and AlterNet, accusing the artificial intelligence company of using copyrighted works without proper attribution.
OpenAI, their joint February lawsuit claimed, illegally trained large language models by removing the copyright management information from Raw Story and AlterNet articles before entering the content into ChatGPT’s system. ChatGPT would then share answers based on their content without citing their work, the lawsuit claimed.
However, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon dismissed the lawsuit on Thursday, saying the two outlets failed to show “any actual adverse effects” from OpenAI doing so.
“Plaintiffs allege that ChatGPT has been trained on a ‘Scrape of most of the Internet,’ which includes massive amounts of information from innumerable sources on almost any given subject. Plaintiffs have nowhere alleged that the information in their articles is copyrighted, nor could they do so,” the judge ruled.
She added: “When a user inputs a question into ChatGPT, ChatGPT synthesizes the relevant information in its repository into an answer. Given the quantity of information contained in the repository, the likelihood that ChatGPT would output plagiarized content from one of Plaintiffs’ articles seems remote.”
The outlets had been seeking damages of at least $2,500 per violation, and also demanded that OpenAI remove all copyrighted material from data training sets. AlterNet and Raw Story filed their lawsuits at the same time The Intercept also opened a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI.
The relationship between AI companies and media outlets has been hot-and-cold over the last year. The New York Times filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft last December over the company using its articles to refine ChatGPT. Eight other papers, including the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News, also sued OpenAI for copyright violations in April.
On the other hand, several media companies, including The Associated Press and News Corp., have reached deals with OpenAI to use their work. Judge McMahon, in her Thursday ruling, pointed out that OpenAI has made several deals with media companies in an effort to avoid such copyright issues.
Pamela Chelin and Natalie Korach contributed to this report.
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