The New York Times has initiated legal action against OpenAI and its close collaborator, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in the Federal District Court in Manhattan, claims that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot used millions of Times’ articles to train AI models without consent. The Times demands the destruction of models containing the contested material and seeks damages for the unlawful use of its works.
The Times emphasizes the importance of protecting independent journalism and warns of societal consequences if news organizations cannot safeguard their content. OpenAI responds by expressing its commitment to working with content creators but expresses surprise and disappointment at the lawsuit, citing ongoing productive conversations with The New York Times.
Generative AI models, such as ChatGPT and Copilot, learn from various examples, and vendors collect data from the web for training sets. While vendors argue that fair use doctrine protects their web-scraping practices, copyright holders, including news organizations, dispute this claim. Legal conflicts between vendors and content creators have arisen, with The Times being the latest to sue over alleged IP violations.
The complaint also cites instances of Microsoft’s Bing Chat (now Copilot) providing incorrect information attributed to The Times, potentially damaging the newspaper’s brand. The Times argues that OpenAI and Microsoft are creating news publisher competitors by using its content, thereby harming its business. The complaint notes generative AI models’ tendency to regurgitate training data and, in some cases, bypass paywalls for news content.
The lawsuit by The Times is one of the largest involving a publisher and underscores the potential harm to the news subscription business and publisher web traffic. Similar concerns are raised in a separate suit against Google by publishers, who argue that the company’s AI experiments divert content, readers, and ad revenue through anticompetitive means.
While some news outlets have opted for licensing agreements with generative AI vendors, The Times claims that attempts to negotiate such an arrangement with Microsoft and OpenAI were unsuccessful. The lawsuit highlights the broader legal challenges and debates surrounding the use of generative AI in the context of intellectual property and fair use.
