That artificial intelligence lives off the work of others, while destroying the source that feeds it, is something we see every day. The Encyclopedia Britannica has said enough, and has denounced OpenAI and Perplexity.
Generative AI does not generate information. It uses data extracted from various sources, mainly online, and at the same time kills them, because chatbots offer the exact information that users are looking for, and they no longer need to enter online pages and media. Without visits, advertising does not pay, and without income, those websites that serve as sources for AI dieas is already happening.
The Encyclopedia Britannica is a good example, with a couple of aggravations: ChatGPT not only steals the content, but literally reproduces it. AND If the AI hallucinates, blame the encyclopediaaccording to the complaint.
Another copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI
The Encyclopedia Britannica began publishing in 1768.. More than 4,000 experts have participated in writing its content, including more than 100 Nobel Prize winnersand five presidents of the United States.
For centuries it was sold in paper format. As happens in the homes of our parents or grandparents, there was not a British home where there was not an encyclopedia in the living room bookstore.
Everything changed with the arrival of the Internet and the CD-ROM. Knowledge moved to digital formats and the cloud. Even so, The Encyclopedia Britannica has continued to survive on the Internetthrough its website, thanks to the quality and prestige of its content. Content that AI now steals without permission, literally reproduces, and leaves the original source without traffic, endangering its existence.
In the lawsuit, Britannica alleges that OpenAI has used more than 100,000 online articles without permission to train your AI models. With them, it generates responses that “copy or imitate, sometimes word for word,” this content. In addition, he also criticizes cases in which the chatbot attributes the AI’s hallucinations to Britannica.
ChatGPT not only uses your content without permission and kills your traffic, but it also damages its reputation and prestige by attributing AI failures to the encyclopedia itself, according to the complaint.
The Britannica company demands compensation from OpenAI for lost profits due to loss of traffic, and asks that its AIs stop using its content. It has also filed a similar complaint against Perplexityaccording to Gizmodo.
OpenAI has other lawsuits pending for copyright infringement, against media outlets such as The New York Times, The Intercept and others. Anthropic paid 1.5 billion dollars to several publishers a few months agofor pirating seven million books. Meta was also caught pirating millions of books with BitTorrent. And thousands of porn movies….
Virtually all generative AI lives off the media and the Internetusing their content and endangering their future, because it takes away all their traffic. And they receive nothing in return. It is an imbalance that AI, which swims in millions, will have to correct, if it does not want to kill the hand that feeds it.