The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for using its published news articles to train their artificial intelligence chatbots without an agreement compensating for intellectual property rights.
The lawsuit, filed in the Federal District Court in Manhattan, represents the first time a major news organization has pursued the developers of ChatGPT for copyright infringement. The New York Times has not specified the amount it seeks from the companies, but this action aims to hold the companies responsible for billions of dollars in legal and actual damages.
The New York Times alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft, creators of ChatGPT and Copilot, are “seeking to benefit for free from The Times’ substantial investment in its journalism” without any licensing agreements.
The complaint highlights that nytimes.com was the most used source for extracting content to train GPT-3.
The Times alleges that more than 66 million records, ranging from breaking news articles to opinion pieces, published on The New York Times and other affiliated brands, were used to train AI models.
The lawsuit claims that the defendants used “nearly a century of copyright-protected content,” causing significant harm to The Times’ essence. The New York Times also states that OpenAI and Microsoft products can “generate outputs that literally narrate The Times content, closely summarize it, and mimic its expressive style.” This reflects similar complaints from others, like Sarah Silverman and Julian Sancton, who claim that OpenAI has benefited from their works.
A spokesperson for OpenAI told Engadget: “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.” In an email, the representative explained that the two parties are engaged in “ongoing productive conversations” and described the lawsuit as unexpected.
The OpenAI spokesperson told Engadget: “We are surprised and disappointed by this development. However, OpenAI hopes that the two will find a mutually beneficial way to work together.”
If the lawsuit makes any progress, it could create opportunities for other publishers to pursue similar legal actions and make AI training models for commercial purposes more expensive. Competitors in this field, like CNN, have already tried to limit the data that AI web crawling programs can collect for training and development purposes.
