Reuters: wikiHow sued OpenAI, alleging it scraped more than 11,000 articles to train GPT models without permission.

The complaint says that copying infringed at least 1,200 registered copyrights and fed models that can reproduce wikiHow text.

This broadens the dispute beyond training because wikiHow says ChatGPT answers can substitute for the how-to pages that supplied the material.

OpenAI says its models use publicly available data under fair use, which also considers whether unlicensed use harms the original work's market.

The case was filed Aug 21 in the Southern District of New York and remains at the complaint stage, with no ruling on wikiHow's allegations.

By alleging both ingestion and substitution, wikiHow is connecting training provenance directly to the market-effect question courts consider under fair use.

The nature of wikiHow’s content gives OpenAI a meaningful defense even if ChatGPT answers the same questions. Copyright protects original expression, but U.S. law does not protect the underlying procedure, process, method, or fact described in an article. A model can therefore explain how to perform a task without automatically infringing the article containing similar instructions.