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)