Publisher of PCMag and Mashable Sues OpenAI

Ziff Davis, the digital publisher behind tech sites like Mashable, PCMag and Lifehacker, sued OpenAI on Thursday, joining a wave of media companies accusing the artificial intelligence giant of stealing its content.

Ziff Davis is one of the largest publishers in the United States, with more than 45 sites globally that together attract an average of 292 million visitors per month, and is among the biggest media companies pressing a claim against OpenAI.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)

In a 62-page complaint filed in federal court in Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, Ziff Davis says the tech company has “intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Ziff Davis works,” infringing on the publisher’s copyrights and diluting its trademarks. It claims that OpenAI used Ziff Davis content to train its artificial intelligence models and generate responses through its popular ChatGPT chatbot.

“OpenAI has taken each of these steps knowing that they violate Ziff Davis’s intellectual property rights and the law,” the complaint says.

The company is seeking at least hundreds of millions of dollars in its lawsuit, according to two people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for OpenAI said in a statement that its models were “grounded in fair use,” referring to the legal standard for use of copyrighted material.

“ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives,” the statement said.

Many executives in the publishing industry, which was profoundly disrupted by the widespread adoption of technologies such as search and social media, have regarded the growing popularity of artificial intelligence with increasing unease. Powerful A.I. systems built by companies like OpenAI have been trained on copyrighted content, drawing an outcry from many media companies.

Those companies have generally responded in one of two ways: striking deals to license their content to companies like OpenAI for millions of dollars, as in the case with News Corp, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, or filing lawsuits to seek damages and reaffirm their rights to intellectual property.

Many of those claims are still working their way through courts. This month, a U.S. judicial panel consolidated several claims against OpenAI, including the one brought by The Times.

Executives at Ziff Davis have been considering for months which path to take, one of the people said. The company decided to sue, in part, in the hope that other publishers would follow.