Encyclopedia Britannica wants ChatGPT to stop copying its work.<\/p>\n
The publisher of the world\u2019s longest-running English-language encyclopedia, along with its subsidiary Merriam-Webster, is suing OpenAI, accusing the company behind ChatGPT of copyright infringement.<\/p>\n
Britannica filed the lawsuit<\/a> in federal court in Manhattan on Friday. The complaint alleges that OpenAI and its AI products are free-riding on the encyclopedia\u2019s and dictionary\u2019s \u201ctrusted, high-quality content\u201d while cannibalizing traffic to their websites.<\/p>\n Britannica claims that OpenAI pilfered its content, including nearly 100,000 online articles, to train its AI models and generate answers that \u201ccopy or mimic, sometimes verbatim,\u201d its material. The company also takes issue with instances where the chatbot attributes AI hallucinations to Britannica.<\/p>\n The encyclopedia is seeking damages and restitution of profits, and is asking the court to stop OpenAI from engaging in the alleged unlawful conduct.<\/p>\n This is far from the first copyright fight OpenAI has found itself in. The company is already facing similar lawsuits from media outlets, including The New York Times<\/a>, The Intercept<\/a>, and U.S. News & World Report<\/a>. Its rival, Anthropic, also recently settled a case with several authors and publishers over the alleged use of 7 million pirated books, reportedly for $1.5 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n And Britannica isn\u2019t new to squaring off with AI companies in the courtroom either. The publisher also sued Perplexity<\/a> in September over similar copyright claims.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s a bit puzzling how Elon Musk\u2019s Grok and its online encyclopedia, Grokpedia<\/a>, have so far avoided the kind of legal scrutiny facing other AI companies.<\/p>\n Musk\u00a0launched Grokipedia<\/a> last October as an alternative to Wikipedia. In a post in September, Musk said Grokipedia would be \u201ca massive improvement over Wikipedia<\/a>.\u201d He has also repeatedly mocked the online encyclopedia as \u201cWokipedia,\u201d arguing that there is no major alternative that reflects right-wingers\u2019 version of reality.<\/p>\n His solution was to create a new platform where articles are generated by AI. Much of Grokpedia\u2019s content appears to draw heavily from (or outright clone<\/a>) Wikipedia, though often with framing that tilts toward Musk\u2019s political views.<\/p>\n So far, Grok\u2019s parent company, xAI, has faced more legal trouble over sexualized deepfakes<\/a> than copyright claims. But the issue may not be far behind. Some authors, including New York Times reporter John Carreyrou, filed a lawsuit<\/a> in December against\u00a0xAI alongside Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Google, alleging the companies used their books without permission to train AI models.<\/p>\n