On Wednesday, Federal Judge Sidney Stein rejected OpenAI’s attempt to dismiss the copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times, which accuses the company of mass theft for using content from its publications to train its artificial intelligence system without consent and without compensation.
The well-known U.S. newspaper filed the lawsuit in 2023 after an impasse in negotiations with OpenAI and Microsoft over a deal to resolve issues related to the use of its articles to feed automated chatbots. The Times, after the launch of ChatGPT and BingChat, notified the companies that their technology violated its articles. The terms of a settlement included a licensing agreement and the establishment of restrictions around generative artificial intelligence tools.
The lawsuit, followed by other news outlets, could have far-reaching implications for the publishing industry. For those in the industry, at stake would be the financial sustainability of the media in a landscape where readers may ignore direct sources in favor of search results generated by AI tools. Depending on the decisions made in lawsuits filed by news outlets, OpenAI could be forced to accept expensive licensing agreements.
In its complaint, the Times presented extensive evidence of OpenAI’s products reproducing almost entirely articles by its journalists, word for word. The paper presented in its lawsuit more than a hundred such incidents concerning ChatGPT alone.
The tech giant subsequently made changes so that its chatbot would no longer provide verbatim copies of articles. As the lawsuit continues, the New York Times revealed earlier this year that it has already spent $10.8 million in 2024 on the various artificial intelligence disputes.
OpenAI’s finding of violations, on the other hand, could result in substantial damages to the company, as the maximum statutory fine for each intentional wrongdoing is $150,000.
Unlike the New York Times, over the past few months other publishers have decided to sign lucrative business deals with Sam Altman’s company. These include, for example, News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, and Condé Nast, owner of the New Yorker.
