Canada’s top AI startup has reached an important industry milestone: getting sued by a group of angry news publishers.
What happened: A collective of 14 media companies, including Toronto Star Newspapers, Condé Nast, and Vox Media, is suing Canadian AI company Cohere for copyright infringement, alleging it improperly used at least 4,000 copyrighted works to train its model.
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The suit also accused Cohere’s chatbot of mimicking paywalled stories to answer queries or copying large portions of stories verbatim without permission.
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Cohere, which has been championed as a homegrown success story and achieved a US$5.5 billion valuation last year, called the suit “misguided and frivolous.”
Why it matters: With a lack of concrete rules about whether using published works to train AI constitutes “fair use,” the result of this suit could help set legal precedents on the issue, alongside a string of other high-profile lawsuits.
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A New York judge is deciding whether a suit against OpenAI by the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and the Center for Investigative Reporting will go to court.
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OpenAI is also facing a potential case under Canadian copyright law after five of Canada’s biggest news publishers filed a joint suit in November.
Big picture: The media copyright crusade against AI scored its first big win earlier this week after a court ruled in favour of Toronto-based Thomson Reuters in a suit against now-defunct legal AI startup Ross Intelligence for copying legal content and research.—QH