A group of Canadian news and media companies filed a lawsuit on Friday against OpenAI, claiming that the ChatGPT maker has violated their copyrights and profited unfairly at their expense. The companies involved in the lawsuit include the Toronto Star, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Globe and Mail, and others who are seeking financial compensation and want OpenAI to stop using their work.

The news companies accused OpenAI of using content taken from their websites to train the large language models that power ChatGPT – content that has required significant time, effort, and resources from the News Media Companies and their journalists, editors, and staff. According to the lawsuit, instead of legally obtaining the information, OpenAI has blatantly appropriated the News Media Companies’ valuable intellectual property without permission or compensation for its own purposes, including commercial use.

In addition to the Canadian news organizations, OpenAI is also facing copyright lawsuits from other entities such as The New York Times, New York Daily News, YouTube creators, and comedian Sarah Silverman. While OpenAI has reached licensing agreements with publishers like The Associated Press, Axel Springer, and Le Monde, the companies involved in the latest lawsuit claim they have never received any form of compensation for OpenAI’s use of their content.

An OpenAI spokesperson stated that ChatGPT is utilized by millions of people globally to enhance their daily lives, foster creativity, and solve complex problems. The spokesperson added that the models are trained on publicly available data, comply with fair use principles, and support innovation while being fair to creators.

This new legal action follows a recent study by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which found that “no publisher – regardless of their connection to OpenAI – was immune to inaccurate representations of their content in ChatGPT.”