OpenAI is attempting to prevent Indian media entities, including those owned by Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, from participating in a copyright lawsuit against the company. In a legal document obtained by Reuters, OpenAI asserts that it does not need to engage in partnerships with these media groups to utilize their publicly available content in training ChatGPT.
The 31-page court filing, disclosed by Reuters for the first time, states that OpenAI refutes using the media groups' content to train its AI models. The dispute stems from claims made by the Indian news agency ANI that ChatGPT has utilized its content without authorization.
Indian outlets such as Adani's NDTV, the Indian Express, the Hindustan Times, and the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), which includes Ambani's Network18, allege that OpenAI is scraping their content from news websites to feed into ChatGPT.
OpenAI emphasized in its filing dated February 11 that it has not employed any content from the applicants or DNPA's members to train its AI models. The company and its legal representatives have yet to respond to Reuters' requests for comment, while the DNPA and the other news outlets are also yet to comment.
OpenAI has previously stated that they construct their AI models using publicly available data within the boundaries of fair use principles supported by established legal precedents. The ongoing global issue has seen courts grappling with claims from authors, news organizations, and artists alleging that technology firms are using their copyrighted material to train AI systems without requisite permissions or compensation.
While OpenAI has established agreements with numerous international news publishers to display their content, Indian groups argue in their legal submissions that OpenAI has not done so locally in India.
The filing clarifies that OpenAI's partnerships abroad are not licensing arrangements specifically aimed at training AI models, and asserts that using publicly available content complies with Indian copyright law.
During a recent visit to Asia, OpenAI's CEO met with India's IT minister in New Delhi to discuss the nation's aspiration to foster a cost-effective AI environment.