The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for their use of its content in training GPT products.

NYT Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against OpenAI Could Be Groundbreaking for Publications

A story broken by deadline.com on December 27th reported that The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft accusing them of copyright infringement. The newspaper claims that OpenAI is using its content to feed automated chatbots, which constitutes “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.” This is the first time a major media organization has sued an AI platform for copyright infringement.

NYTimes.com posted a story on the lawsuit three hours after deadline.com with the sub-headline, “Millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it, the lawsuit said.”

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, argues that Open AI and Microsoft should be held responsible for billions of dollars in damages. The suit also demands the destruction of both chatbot and training models that use copyrighted material from The Times.
According to the lawsuit, The New York Times invests heavily in its journalism, with a large and expensive organization providing legal, security, and operational support. The newspaper’s content is created by editors who ensure the highest standards of accuracy and fairness. The lawsuit claims that Open AI’s unlawful use of The Times’s work to create competing AI products threatens the newspaper’s ability to provide its services.

Open AI’s AI tools, which rely on large-language models (LLMs), were allegedly built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted articles, investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, and guides. While the defendants engaged in widescale copying from various sources, they gave particular emphasis to The Times’s content when building their LLMs.

Generative AI, led by Microsoft’s Open AI, trains chatbots using large datasets. The lawsuit alleges that Open AI uses The Times’s content without permission or payment to create substitute products that compete with the newspaper and divert its audience.

This lawsuit follows other pending cases where intellectual property owners, including Sarah Silverman, John Grisham, and Getty Images, have sued AI platforms for infringement. The Authors Guild, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, Michael Connelly, Jodi Picoult, and other fiction writers have filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that their works are being infringed upon by the technology. Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon and playwright David Henry Hwang have also filed a class action lawsuit against Meta for using their works to train its LLaMA AI platform without their consent.

The New York Times alleges that Open AI and Microsoft have unlawfully copied its content to develop AI products, posing a threat to the newspaper’s ability to provide its services. The lawsuit seeks significant damages and the destruction of infringing chatbot and training models.

read more at deadline.com