IGN and CNET owner Ziff Davis Sues OpenAI for Copying Its Articles

Ziff Davis, the company behind popular websites like IGN, CNET, and PCMag, is suing OpenAI. The company says OpenAI used its content without asking. According to The New York Times, Ziff Davis claims OpenAI made “exact copies” of its articles and used them to train ChatGPT.

Ziff Davis owns over 45 media brands and employs more than 3,800 people. The company says it publishes nearly 2 million new articles each year and gets about 292 million visits every month.

In the lawsuit, Ziff Davis says it told web crawlers not to collect its data by using a robots.txt file. But the company says OpenAI ignored that and still took their content. They also say OpenAI removed copyright info from the articles it used.

Ziff Davis said: “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.”

The company wants the court to stop OpenAI from using its content and to destroy any datasets or AI models that include its articles.

Ziff Davis joins other media companies suing OpenAI, like The New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet, and a group of Canadian news companies. Some outlets, like The Associated Press, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, have signed deals with OpenAI to share content. Ziff Davis chose not to do that.

OpenAI responded with a statement.
Jason Deutrom, a spokesperson for OpenAI, said: “ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives. Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.”

Ziff Davis declined to comment further, and you can check out the details of the complaint by following this link.

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