Ziff Davis, the owner of IGN, CNET, Everyday Health, and PCMag media outlets, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. The media firm alleged that OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent company, has been using works produced by Ziff Davis’ outlets without its consent. 

As first reported, Ziff Davis, the digital media firm behind popular sites such as PCMag, Lifehacker, and IGN, filed a lawsuit on Thursday against OpenAI. The media firm joined a wave of giant companies that have sued the AI giant for using their content without permission. 

In its 62-page lawsuit filed in a Delaware court, Ziff Davis said OpenAI has deliberately and relentlessly recreated exact copies of its works. The lawsuit also claimed that OpenAI intentionally and relentlessly created derivatives of its works, infringing on the company’s copyrights and diluting its trademark.

Ziff Davis claims OpenAI used its work without consent

Ziff Davis, the firm that owns several digital outlets, including IGN, Everyday Health, PCMag, and Mashable, has sued OpenAI over claims of using its works without permission.

In a 62-page lawsuit filed in a Delaware federal court, Ziff Davis claimed OpenAI intentionally and continuously created exact copies of the works produced by various outlets owned by Ziff Davis. The Vivek Shah-led media firm said that it had instructed web crawlers to avoid scraping its data with the help of robots.txt file. 

The Vivek Shah-led media firm claimed that OpenAI violated this policy. The Mashable owner added that the artificial intelligence firm reportedly removed copyright details from the works it sucks up. The firm claimed that the AI firm copied some of its content from its outlets. It added that OpenAI also reproduced its published content without its direct permission.

The Mashable owner also alleged that the AI giant firm stored the works of its outlets, which it allegedly used to develop responses in ChatGPT. 

The lawsuit read in part, “Ziff Davis has identified hundreds of full copies of the body text of Ziff Davis Works in merely the small sample of OpenAI’s WebText dataset that it made publicly available.” Ziff Davis asked the federal court to stop the AI firm from exploiting the works of its media outlets. The media firm also asked the court to compel OpenAI to destroy any models or datasets containing content from Ziff Davis media outlets. 

Ziff Davis revealed that it owned over 45 media brands. The Vivek Shah-led media conglomerate added that it employed over 3,800 staff, making it one of the largest media publishers to file a lawsuit against OpenAI so far. The company said that it produced over 2 million new articles annually. 

The PCMag owner also stated that its outlets averaged above 292 million user visits every month. Ziff Davis argued that OpenAI has abandoned its openness and transparent publication practices, leading to a violation of copyright laws. The media firm confirmed that it will prove that most of the LLMs used in training OpenAI models are infringed works of Ziff Davis outlets. 

Ziff Davis’s suit joins a series of lawsuits against OpenAI

OpenAI has signed multiple licensing agreements with the Washington Post, Vox Media, The Atlantic, The Associated Press, and The Financial Times. The IGN owner claimed that OpenAI did not have a licensing agreement with it. The media firm has joined the likes of The Intercept, The New York Times, AlterNet, and Raw Story in suing the artificial intelligence giant over copyright infringement.

OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom recently argued that the chatbot helped with the improvement of human creativity. Duetrom added that ChatGPT enabled millions of users to improve their lives. He also said that their chatbot helped with medical research and scientific discovery.

While responding to the allegations of copyright infringement, the OpenAI spokesperson clarified that their models were designed to empower innovation and are trained using publicly available materials. He noted that all their AI models were grounded in fair use.

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