ChatGPT: India media seek to join lawsuit against OpenAI chatbot

India’s biggest media organisations are seeking to add a complaint against OpenAI, the US company behind ChatGPT, for alleged illegal use of their information.

The media agencies include some of India’s oldest magazines like The Indian Express, The Hindu, The India Today group, businessman Gautam Adani-owned NDTV, and over a hundred people.

OpenAI refutes the accusations and told the BBC that it only uses “publicly available information” that is consistent with “widely accepted legal norms.”

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in Delhi to explore India’s prepare for a low-cost Artificial ecosystem with IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.

He claimed that India” should be one of the frontrunners of the Artificial revolution” and that previous statements from 2023, in which he claimed American businesses may struggle to engage, had been taken out of context.

According to local media, he claimed that” India is a very significant market for both OpenAI and AI in common.”

The largest news agency in India, Asian News International ( ANI), filed a legal case against OpenAI in November.

ANI accuses ChatGPT of using its copyrighted materials improperly- which OpenAI denies- and is seeking damages of 20m pounds ($ 230, 000, £185, 000 ).

The case holds significance for ChatGPT given its plans to expand in the country. According to a survey, India already has the largest user base of ChatGPT.

Chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on massive datasets collected by crawling through the internet. The content produced by nearly 450 news channels and 17,000 newspapers in India holds huge potential for this.

There is, however, no clarity on what fabric ChatGPT is officially gather and use for this goal.

OpenAI is facing at least a few complaints across the world filed by producers, artists and media companies, who have all accused ChatGPT of using their information without consent.

The most prominent of them was filed by The New York Times in December 2023, in which the newspaper demanded “billions of dollars” in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, its backer.

A jury selection would also have some compelling benefit for other similar cases from around the globe, says Vibhav Mithal, an attorney at the Indian law company Anand and Anand.

According to Mr. Mithal, the outcome of the lawsuit brought by ANI may “define how these AI models will run in the future” and “what copyrighted information content can be used to train AI conceptual models [like ChatGPT].”

A court ruling in ANI’s favour could spark further legal cases as well as opening the possibility of AI companies entering into license sharing agreements with content creators, which some companies have already started doing.

” But a decision in OpenAI’s favor will give us more freedom to teach AI designs using copyrighted protected information,” he said.

ANI distributes information to its paying subscribers and holds unique copyrights over a sizable collection of words, images, and movies.

ANI claims in its lawsuit that OpenAI improperly trained ChatGPT using its information. According to ANI, this improved the robot, which has benefited OpenAI.

The information agency claimed to have offered to give the business a permit to use its data before filing the lawsuit and that it had informed OpenAI that its content was being used fraudulently.

According to ANI, OpenAI turned down the offer and placed the news agency on an interior blocklist so that its information is no longer being gathered. Additionally, it requested that ANI turn off some web crawlers to prevent ChatGPT from crawling its information.

The media firm says that despite these measures, ChatGPT picks up its content from websites of its users. This has enriched OpenAI “unjustly”, it says.

Additionally, ANI claims in its lawsuit that the bot verbally generates its content for specific prompts. In some instances, ANI says, ChatGPT has erroneously attributed comments to the news agency, hampering its reliability and misleading the public.

ANI has requested that the court order OpenAI to quit keeping and using its work in addition to requesting compensation for damages.

OpenAI responds by saying that the company’s servers are not located in India and that the robot has not been trained it. In its response, the company claims it opposes the situation being filed in India.

The Federation of Indian Publishers filed a lawsuit in court in December, claiming they were “directly affected” by this event and should be able to provide their arguments because well. It claims to represent 80 % of American publishers, including the American headquarters of Penguin Random House and Oxford University Press.

A month later, Digital News Publishers Association ( DNPA ), which represents leading Indian news outlets, and three other media outlets filed a similar application. They claimed that a similar concept had not been followed in India despite OpenAI having entered into licensing contracts with foreign media publishers like the Associated Press and Financial Times.

The event would have an impact on the livelihood of journalists and the full news industry, according to DNPA. OpenAI has, nevertheless, argued that bots are not a” supplement” for news membership and are not used for such reasons.

The court has not yet given these publishers’ uses an acknowledgement, and OpenAI has argued that the judge may not notice them.

The judge will only be allowed to hear ANI’s promises because the other parties had not filed their own lawsuits, the prosecutor said.

However, OpenAI told the BBC it is interesting in” constructive alliances and conversations” with media companies around the world, including India, to “work collaboratively”.

Analysts believe that the lawsuits brought forth against ChatGPT around the world could bring attention to aspects of chatbots that have largely escaped scrutiny.

According to Dr. Sivaramakrishnan R. Guruvayur, whose research focuses on ethical use of artificial intelligence, one of the characteristics of chatbot training data is.

The ANI-OpenA I case will lead the court” to evaluate the data sources” of chatbots, he said.

Governments across the world have been grappling with how to regulate AI. In 2023, Italy blocked ChatGPT saying that the chatbot’s mass collection and storage of personal data raised privacy concerns.

The European Union approved a law to regulate AI last year.

The Indian government too has indicated plans to regulate AI. Before the 2024 election, the government issued an advisory that AI tools that were “under-testing” or “unreliable” should get government permission before launching.

Additionally, it demanded that AI tools refrain from” threaten the integrity of the electoral process” or refrain from “generating responses that are unlawful in India.”