The Encyclopaedia Britannica has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing it of improperly using reference materials to train its models

The Encyclopedia Britannica Company and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in the Manhattan Federal Court, accusing the artificial intelligence (AI) giant of abusing its reference materials to train its AI models.

Reuters reported that in the complaint filed last Friday (March 13th), it was stated that OpenAI used online articles, encyclopedias and dictionary entries of the British Library to train the chatbot ChatGPT on how to respond to users' questions; OpenAI also generated content summaries through artificial intelligence, "consuming" the network traffic of the British Library.

The lawsuit also alleges that OpenAI infringed upon the trademark rights of Encyclopaedia Britannica, including suggesting that it copied the content of Encyclopaedia Britannica with permission, and incorrectly citing Encyclopaedia Britannica in the artificial intelligence-generated false "hallucinations".

The Encyclopaedia Britannica Company has requested the court to issue an order to prohibit these infringements, and at the same time demands an unspecified amount of compensation from OpenAI.

This is the latest case where a technology company used materials without permission to train an artificial intelligence system, and was subsequently sued by the copyright owner. Last year, the Encyclopaedia Britannica Company also filed a similar lawsuit against Perplexity AI, and the case is still ongoing.

The proponents of artificial intelligence enterprises argue that their systems convert copyrighted content into new content, which is considered a fair use.