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Ziff Davis, the digital media conglomerate behind IGN, CNET, and PCMag, is suing OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement. The lawsuit, initially reported by The New York Times, accuses OpenAI of using unauthorized copies of Ziff Davis content to train its AI models, ignoring robots.txt directives designed to prevent web scraping. The company also claims that copyright information was removed from the scraped content.

Ziff Davis, which boasts a portfolio of over 45 media brands, produces approximately 2 million articles each year, attracting an average of 292 million monthly user visits. While some media companies have opted for content licensing agreements with OpenAI, Ziff Davis has joined a growing number of entities pursuing legal action, including The New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet, and several Canadian media organizations.

The lawsuit contends that OpenAI unlawfully copied and stored Ziff Davis’s intellectual property to power responses in ChatGPT. Ziff Davis claims to have found “hundreds of full copies” of its articles within a small sample of OpenAI’s WebText dataset. The company is seeking a court order to prevent further exploitation of its content and demands the destruction of any datasets or AI models containing its copyrighted material.

OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom responded to the allegations by stating that their models are “trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.” He added that “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.” Ziff Davis has declined to comment further on the case.