The New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for “billions”.
The US news organisation has launched legal action against the two Artificial Intelligence giants - whose chatbot gives users generated answers to queries, produces essays and other creative pursuits with information pulled across the world wide web - over copyright violations that have been estimated to cost the newspaper “billions of dollars” after they used their material to train their large language models using data.
According to the filing, The New York Times claims that the two defendants have used “millions” of articles to increase the knowledge base of the two chatbots - who have come under fire by experts in the field for stealing content before, along with concerns about misinformation and the threat to the job market - without consent to do so.
In addition, the case also alleges that ChatGPT - which is the flagship product of the Sam Altman-led company and has received more than $10 billion in investment from Microsoft - will supply “verbatim excerpts” from their news stories, which cannot be accessed without paying.
The lawsuit - which was submitted on Wednesday (27.12.23) in a New York City federal court - claims that readers can find New York Times content for free, therefore leaving them with a loss in revenue from both subscription and advertising.
In April, the New York Times Company - the publisher of the Manhattan-based daily broadsheet edited by Joseph Kahn - approached the two tech firms to reach “an amicable resolution” regarding their copyright concern. Still, according to the court documents, this proved unsuccessful.
This comes a month after OpenAI appeared to be dealing with an internal mutiny following the sacking and the eventual reinstatement of their 38-year-old CEO after just a few days.
After he was let go, the industry went into meltdown and staff members threatened to leave the company unless he was brought back.
Currently, they are facing a string of legal issues after various lawsuits were filed over the course of 2023. A similar copyright case to the New York Times was submitted by a group of influential authors such as John Grisham and George RR Martin in September.
The comedian Sarah Silverman also began pursuing similar copyright claims in July, the same month writers such as Margaret Attwood and Phillip Pullman put their names to an open letter urging for compensation when their work was used in their results.
