Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster, retains the copyright to nearly 100,000 online articles, which have been scraped and used to train OpenAI's LLMs without permission, the publisher alleges in the lawsuit. Britannica also accuses OpenAI of violating copyright laws when it generates outputs that contain 'full or partial verbatim reproductions' of its content and when the AI lab uses its articles in ChatGPT's RAG (retrieval augmented generation) workflow. OpenAI's RAG tool is how the LLM scans the web or other databases for newly updated information when responding to a query. Britannica also alleges that OpenAI violates the Lanham Act, a trademark statute, when it generates made-up hallucinations and attributes them falsely to the publisher. 'ChatGPT starves web publishers like [Britannica] of revenue by generating responses to users' queries that substitute, and directly compete with, the content from publishers like [Britannica],' the lawsuit reads. Britannica also alleges...
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