The NY Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft with copyright infringement over the use of its content to train generative artificial intelligence and large-language model systems. The New York Times suing OpenAI and Microsoft could see the company receive billions of dollars in damages.
The NY Times OpenAI and Microsoft copyright infringement lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, claims that while the companies copied information from many sources to build their systems, they give New York Times content “particular emphasis” and “seek to free-ride on the Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment”.
NY Times sues OpenAI Microsoft
New York Times is suing OpenAI Microsoft, for the “unlawful use” of the paper’s “copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more” to create artificial intelligence products “threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service”, the lawsuit claims.
NY Times OpenAI and Microsoft copyright lawsuit contains an appeal to the “vital” importance of the Times’s independent journalism to democracy, arguing that it is “increasingly rare and valuable”.
Intersection of AI, journalism, and ethics
NY Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft with a lawsuit is the latest in a string of similar cases, including one brought by more than a dozen authors in September targeting the company for its use of their writing.
Language learning models have faced increasing scrutiny since they exploded in popularity in the past year, with news outlets in particular concerned that the tools will spread misinformation attributed to them and utilize their content with no incentive to click through to the original source.
OpenAI has been sued over its use of copyrighted materials by fiction writers on multiple occasions, including in one ongoing class-action lawsuit. The Getty photo archive sued a separate AI firm over its use of its images in September.
Unethical use of information
NY Times OpenAI Microsoft copyright lawsuit came to fruition after an apparent breakdown in negotiations over the companies’ use of Times material. In the filing, the Times said it had approached OpenAI and Microsoft about the use of its intellectual property to explore “an amicable resolution”, including commercial agreements and “guardrails” around AI products – but the discussions had stalled.
NY Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft due to the issue of AI “hallucinations”, typically false information that can be wrongly attributed to a source, that it said potentially damages the Times’s brand. It identified material on Microsoft’s Bing Chat that it claims was misidentified as Times content, including results for “the 15 most heart-healthy foods”. Twelve of those had not been mentioned in the Times story, as per the lawsuit.
No monetary claims
NY Times OpenAI Microsoft copyright lawsuit does not contain a monetary claim, but says that OpenAI, valued at $80bn, and its partner Microsoft, valued at $2.8tn, should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages”.
The suit also called on the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from the Times.
Partnership between AI and journalism
With tension growing over use of published materials to train ChatGPT, OpenAI has announced partnerships seeking to assuage concerns. Earlier this month, OpenAI announced a partnership with the German publishing giant Axel Springer to “enrich users’ experience with ChatGPT by adding recent and authoritative content on a wide variety of topics, and explicitly values the publisher’s role in contributing to OpenAI’s products”.
“With this partnership, ChatGPT users around the world will receive summaries of selected global news content from Axel Springer’s media brands,” Open AI said in a press release, adding that information on the system would “include attribution and links to the full articles for transparency and further information”.
“We want to explore the opportunities of AI empowered journalism – to bring quality, societal relevance and the business model of journalism to the next level,” said Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer.
Microsoft and OpenAI on lawsuit
Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment.
“We respect the rights of content creators and owners,” OpenAI said in an emailed 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.”
Future of AI with news industry
NY Times OpenAI Microsoft lawsuit could test the emerging legal contours of generative AI technologies. The content AI can create after learning from large data set and this could carry major implications for the news industry.
