New York Times takes legal action against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement
The New York Times has initiated legal proceedings against OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, and Microsoft, claiming that their copyright was violated during the training of the language model. The lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan federal court, seeks damages amounting to "billions of dollars" from both companies.
ChatGPT, along with other large language models (LLMs), learns by analyzing extensive datasets, often sourced online.
The New York Times alleges that "millions" of its articles were used without permission to enhance ChatGPT's capabilities. This, according to the lawsuit, has led to ChatGPT competing with the newspaper as a reliable information source.
The lawsuit points out that when queried about current events, ChatGPT occasionally generates "verbatim excerpts" from New York Times articles, content that is typically behind a subscription paywall.
Consequently, readers can access New York Times material without paying for it, resulting in lost subscription revenue and advertising clicks for the newspaper.
An illustrative example cited in the lawsuit involves the Bing search engine, which incorporates features powered by ChatGPT. The search engine reportedly produces results sourced from a New York Times-owned website without providing links to the article or including referral links, impacting the newspaper's income generation.
The legal action, filed on Wednesday, revealed that the New York Times had previously approached Microsoft and OpenAI in April, attempting to find an "amicable resolution" regarding the copyright concerns.
However, the discussions proved unsuccessful, leading to the formal lawsuit.
This legal challenge follows a period of internal turbulence at OpenAI, where co-founder and CEO Sam Altman faced a brief termination and subsequent rehiring within a few days.
Moreover, this is not the first copyright infringement case filed against the AI company.
In September, last year, a similar case was brought by a group of US authors including Game of Thrones novelist George RR Martin and John Grisham.
That was barely a few months after legal action by comedian Sarah Silverman, as well as an open letter signed by authors Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman calling for AI companies to compensate them for using their work.
The company is also facing a lawsuit alongside Microsoft - and programming site GitHub - from a group of computing experts who argue their code was used without their permission to train an AI called Copilot.
Several cases against developers of generative AI have also emerged, with artists using text-to-image generators Stability AI and Midjourney in January, alleging the usage of copyrighted artwork in training. None of these lawsuits have reached resolutions as of yet.
