Not unlike how Stitch throws a book at Cobra Bubbles, Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster are throwing OpenAI under the justice system of the law, for unlawfully copying its copyrighted reference materials to train its GPT models “at massive scale.” That’s gotta hurt!

 

Frank Landymore writing for Futurism.com has the scoop:

 

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/encyclopedia-britannica-sues-openai

[…] OpenAI “cannibalized” Britannica’s web traffic by showing ChatGPT users an AI-generated summary of its content, Britannica said, hurting its bottom line.

This argument echoes those raised by journalism outlets and other online sites, which find their traffic being suffocated as more people use AI chatbots instead of a traditional search engine.

“ChatGPT starves web publishers like [Britannica] of revenue by generating responses to users’ queries that substitute, and directly compete with, the content from publishers like [Britannica],” the encyclopedia maker said in the complaint.

Citing a key piece of US trademark law called the Lanham Act, Britannica further accuses OpenAI of violating its trademarks when ChatGPT hallucinates made-up answers and wrongly attributes them to Britannica, which it also says gives the false impression that the usage of its content is approved or sponsored by the encyclopedia.

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