India’s leading news organisations are filing a lawsuit against OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT) for using their copyrighted content without permission to train their AI (artificial intelligence) chatbot.

The involved media houses include some of the oldest ones such as The Indian Express, The India Today Group, The Hindu, billionaire Gautam Adani-owned NDTV, and many others.

However, OpenAI denied the allegations and said it uses ‘publicly available data’.

In his recent visit to India, Sam Altman CEO of OpenAI seemed impressed by the country’s AI potential and said it should be among the leaders in the AI revolution.

The lawsuit was initially filed in the Delhi High Court in November 2024 by ANI (Asian News International), India’s largest news agency. Now, dozens of India’s leading media organisations are joining this legal action.

These media houses claim that OpenAI has used their copyrighted content to train ChatGPT without their permission. As this is a clear violation of copyright law, they are seeking financial compensation for this unauthorised use and a court order to stop OpenAI from doing the same in the future.

Publishers, artists, and news organisations worldwide have filed at least a dozen lawsuits against OpenAI, accusing ChatGPT of copyright infringement.

Vibhav Mithal, AI lawyer (Anand and Anand) said, ‘A decision by any court would also hold some persuasive value for other similar cases around the world’.

He said ANI’s lawsuit verdict could ‘define how these AI models will operate in the future’ and ‘what copyrighted news content can be used to train AI generative models [like ChatGPT]’.

‘But a ruling in OpenAI’s favour will lead to more freedom to use copyrighted protected data to train AI models’, he added.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7ze00ly1zo