Nielsen’s Gracenote sues OpenAI over use of metadata in AI training

By Blake Brittain

March 10 (Reuters) – Nielsen’s Gracenote, which creates metadata that identifies movies, TV programs and other media, sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, alleging that its work was used without permission to train artificial intelligence.

* Gracenote said in the complaint that OpenAI misused itscopyrighted material to train ChatGPT to reproduce its contentdescriptions and identifiers. * An OpenAI spokesperson said the company’s AI models”empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available dataand grounded in fair use.” * Gracenote CEO Jared Grusd said in a statement that OpenAI”chose to use decades of our proprietary work without permissionto build and sell its models” * Gracenote requested an unspecified amount of monetarydamages and a court order blocking OpenAI from using its data. * Gracenote said it employs more than 1,000 editors who”painstakingly source, ingest, aggregate, research, edit, write,curate, and link content” for its database of shows and movies. * The lawsuit says Gracenote was able to prompt ChatGPT tocreate copies of its identifiers and descriptions of populartelevision shows including “Breaking Bad,” “Game of Thrones,””The Office” and “Saturday Night Live,” indicating that OpenAIused them in its training. * Gracenote has traditionally licensed its metadata to mediadistributors. The complaint also says it licenses its materialto other AI providers for their training. It alleges thatOpenAI’s use of Gracenote’s content threatens to undercut bothmarkets.

(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by Edmund Klamann)