The New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging that the two businesses “copied and used millions” of the newspaper’s stories to create their AI models, and as a result, “directly compete” with its material.
According to the complaint, the Times claims that ChatGPT and Copilot are powered by Microsoft’s and OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs), which “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style.” The Times claims that this “undermine[s] and damage[s]” its connection with readers and denies it “subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue.”
Additionally, the complaint claims that by impairing news organizations’ capacity to safeguard and monetise content, these AI models “threaten high-quality journalism.” The lawsuit claims that “Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment” through OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat, which was recently rebranded as “Copilot.”
According to the lawsuit, Microsoft and OpenAI have found the release of AI models that were trained on the Times’ content to be “extremely lucrative.” The publication states that it has been attempting to negotiate to “ensure it received fair value for the use of its content” with both companies for months, but has not been successful in coming to an agreement. The Verge’s request for comment was not immediately answered by Microsoft or OpenAI.
The newspaper is requesting that both businesses pay “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” in response to their alleged duplication of its works in a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement. It also requests that the court exclude the Times’ work from the datasets used by Microsoft and OpenAI, and prohibit them from using it to train their AI models.
The AI startup OpenAI is unable to continue scraping content from the New York Times website and using it to train its models because the news organization has disabled OpenAI’s web crawler in recent months. Additionally, Reuters, CNN, and the BBC have taken action to stop OpenAI’s web crawler. Conversely, several magazines are welcoming artificial intelligence (AI) or at least the associated fees. Axel Springer, the parent company of Politico and Business Insider, and OpenAI reached an agreement earlier this month that permits ChatGPT to retrieve data straight from both Axel Springer and OpenAI, while the Associated Press will provide OpenAI with news stories to train its models on for the next two years.
