By Munsif Vengattil, Aditya Kalra, and Arpan Chaturvedi
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – OpenAI seeks to prevent Indian media conglomerates, including those associated with Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, from participating in a copyright lawsuit against the company from the United States. In a legal document obtained by Reuters, OpenAI claims that it does not employ their content for training its ChatGPT AI technology.
The tech firm, backed by Microsoft, asserts that it is not compelled to engage in partnership agreements with these media entities in order to utilize their publicly available content. According to a 31-page court filing by OpenAI, disclosed by Reuters for the first time, the company maintains that it does not have an obligation to involve these media groups in their operations.
The lawsuit in question was brought forth by the Indian news agency ANI last year. It alleges that ChatGPT incorporates its published content without authorization to enhance the proficiency of its chatbot. Subsequently, book publishers and media organizations in India have united to take part in the legal proceedings.
Allegations have been made by Adani’s NDTV, the Indian Express, the Hindustan Times, and the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), which represents numerous entities including Ambani’s Network18. They claim that OpenAI is scraping content from their news websites and reproducing their work using ChatGPT.
In its filing dated February 11, OpenAI refuted claims that it had utilized any content from the applicants or members of the DNPA to train its AI models. Despite requests from Reuters, OpenAI and its legal representatives refrained from immediate comment, as did the DNPA and the other implicated news outlets.
OpenAI has previously stated, “We build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by long-standing and widely accepted legal precedents.”
Legal disputes worldwide are grappling with accusations from authors, news entities, and musicians against tech companies that allegedly exploit their copyrighted material to train AI services without consent or compensation. While OpenAI has entered into agreements with news publishers globally to display content, the Indian groups contest that similar deals have not been established in India.
The filing from OpenAI clarified that its partnerships abroad do not constitute “licensing arrangements for the purpose of training” its AI models. Moreover, the company argued in the document that the utilization of publicly available content is permissible under Indian copyright regulations.
During a recent visit to Asia, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with India’s IT minister in New Delhi to discuss the country’s endeavor to establish an affordable AI ecosystem.
(Reporting by Munsif Vengattil, Aditya Kalra, and Arpan Chaturvedi. Editing by Jane Merriman)
