Media Company Gracenote Takes OpenAI to Court Over AI Training Data

Nielsen's Gracenote filed a federal lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the AI company illegally used its movie and TV show metadata to train ChatGPT. The media data company is seeking monetary damages and wants the court to stop OpenAI from using its proprietary content.

A major media data company has taken legal action against the creators of ChatGPT, claiming its copyrighted material was stolen to help train the popular artificial intelligence system.

Gracenote, owned by Nielsen, filed the federal lawsuit in Manhattan court on Tuesday. The company specializes in creating detailed information about movies, television shows, and other entertainment content.

According to the legal filing, OpenAI improperly took Gracenote’s protected material to teach ChatGPT how to generate similar content descriptions and identification tags without obtaining proper authorization.

An OpenAI representative defended the company’s practices, stating their artificial intelligence systems “empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.”

Gracenote’s chief executive Jared Grusd criticized OpenAI’s actions in a public statement, saying the company “chose to use decades of our proprietary work without permission to build and sell its models.”

The lawsuit seeks unspecified financial compensation and a judicial order preventing OpenAI from continuing to utilize Gracenote’s information.

Gracenote highlighted that it maintains a workforce of over 1,000 editors who “painstakingly source, ingest, aggregate, research, edit, write, curate, and link content” to build comprehensive databases about entertainment programming.

The legal complaint demonstrates that researchers were able to get ChatGPT to generate exact copies of Gracenote’s descriptions and tags for hit television series such as “Breaking Bad,” “Game of Thrones,” “The Office” and “Saturday Night Live,” suggesting OpenAI incorporated this material during the training process.

Gracenote typically earns revenue by licensing its entertainment metadata to media distribution companies. The lawsuit notes that the company also provides authorized licensing agreements to other artificial intelligence developers for training purposes. The complaint argues that OpenAI’s unauthorized usage could damage both of these business segments.