Recently, WikiHow, the world's largest collaborative "how-to" lifestyle guide encyclopedia, has officially filed a lawsuit against AI industry giant OpenAI in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The core focus of this lawsuit is that OpenAI擅自 scraped over 11,000 tutorial articles covering daily tasks to professional skills without permission, used them to train ChatGPT and the GPT series large language models, and is suspected of infringing at least 1,200 registered copyrights.

As a platform dedicated to building the most practical and comprehensive guide to everything, WikiHow detailed in its complaint the serious commercial impact caused by the large model. After being "fed" with massive tutorial data, the current ChatGPT can directly reproduce WikiHow's text content based on user prompts and autonomously generate complete tutorials on similar topics. This approach of replacing human work with AI allows users to get answers without visiting the original website.

The lawsuit states that this not only greatly reduces the cost, effort, and time required to produce similar content, but also directly diverts and cuts down WikiHow's core traffic and revenue. In the long term, such copyright infringement may gradually erode the motivation of creators to continue producing high-quality articles. Therefore, WikiHow requests the court to order OpenAI to compensate and issue an injunction to completely stop OpenAI from continuing to infringe its intellectual property rights.

Regarding this significant lawsuit, an OpenAI spokesperson later publicly responded that the company's AI models were trained entirely using publicly available data, and this behavior is based on the legal principle of "fair use." As of now, the official spokesperson and attorney for WikiHow have not made further public comments on this response. This case is undoubtedly another key indicator for measuring the boundaries between AI training and traditional copyright protection.