This past Wednesday, The New York Times announced that it’s suing ChatGPT creator OpenAI and its main backer, Microsoft, on the grounds of federal copyright infringement.
The lawsuit was filed in Manhattan district court and claims that OpenAI and Microsoft used “millions” of copyrighted articles to create and develop artificial intelligence programs that are seemingly threatening to The Times’ and many other news outlets’ sustainability and ability to provide a service to consumers.
This budding lawsuit is a significant one on top of the various other legal battles between tech giants and new/media companies in the past year.
This litigation has been the first initiated by a major media organization against OpenAI and Microsoft, and The NYT is seeking unspecified damages and wishes the court to order the “destruction” of GPT and “large-language models” that were trained using their published work.
“Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as ‘Copilot’) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment,” the lawsuit reads. According to the formal complaint, the newspaper “seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.”
However, OpenAI and Microsoft continue to assert that using copyrighted pieces to train AI programs is “fair use” of the articles.
“We respect the rights of content creators and owners and are committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models,” an OpenAI spokesperson claimed in a public statement. “Our ongoing conversations with the New York Times have been productive and moving forward constructively, so we are surprised and disappointed with this development. We’re hopeful that we will find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we are doing with many other publishers.”
Yet The Times continues to assert that the conduct regarding the use of their articles is against federal regulations pertaining to copyright matters. A spokesperson for the outlet reported to The Post that “Settled copyright law protects our journalism and content. If Microsoft and OpenAI want to use our work for commercial purposes, the law requires that they first obtain our permission. They have not done so.”
In efforts to further their case, The Times’ legal team cited several examples of ChatGPT repeating information from their articles and those by their extended product review site Wirecutter, “verbatim”, in the filed lawsuit.
The newspaper’s complaint also stated that in a considerable number of these instances, the replies or answers issued by the chatbots did not cite the original article from which they gathered the information. Additionally, there were allegedly multiple cases where the AI bots wrongly regurgitated things from a Times’ article.
