Encyclopedia Britannica and its Merriam-Webster subsidiary have sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court for allegedly misusing their reference materials to train its artificial intelligence models.
Britannica said in the complaint, opens new tab filed on Friday that Microsoft-backed OpenAI used its online articles and encyclopedia and dictionary entries to teach its flagship chatbot ChatGPT to respond to human prompts and "cannibalized" Britannica's web traffic with AI-generated summaries of its content.
In August, parents Matthew and Maria Raine sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, over their 16-year-old son Adam's suicide, accusing the company of wrongful death. On Tuesday, OpenAI responded to the lawsuit with a filing of its own, arguing that it shouldn't be held responsible for the teenager's death.
OpenAI has decided that its nonprofit division will retain control over its for-profit org, after the company initially announced that it planned to convert to a for-profit organization.
OpenAI is raising the specter of China and predicting the US will lose the AI race if it's unable to scrape copyrighted materials.