The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using millions of articles from the newspaper without permission to help train artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
The Times said it was the first major U.S. media organization to sue OpenAI and Microsoft, which created ChatGPT and other AI platforms, over copyright issues.
“Defendants seek to profit from The Times’ massive investment in its journalism by using it to create substitute products without authorization or payment,” according to the complaint filed Wednesday in Manhattan Federal Court.
“There is nothing ‘transformative’ about using Times content without payment to create products that replace the Times and steal audiences.”
The Times is not seeking specific damages, but estimates that OpenAI and Microsoft caused “billions of dollars” in damages by illegally copying and using his works.
In a statement to CBC News, OpenAI said: “We respect the rights of content creators and owners and are committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models .
“Our ongoing conversations with The New York Times have been productive and are progressing constructively, so we are surprised and disappointed by this development. We hope we can find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we do with many others . editors.”
Investors value OpenAI at more than US$80 billion. None of the allegations have been proven in court.
Authors denounce misuse of their books
Last September, a group of 17 prominent American authors – including George RR Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult – joined a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the company had pirated hundreds of books online without authorization or compensation.
AI systems like ChatGPT, launching in late 2022, learn to generate new content by first ingesting huge amounts of existing content, often scraped from the internet. The collected material is then used to create a large language model capable of producing human-like responses to a user’s query.
In documents filed in New York federal court, the authors allege “egregious and harmful violations of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights” and call the ChatGPT program a “massive commercial enterprise” that relies on “systematic theft from large scale “.
The trial was organized by the Authors Guild and includes, among others, David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen and Elin Hilderbrand.
More than 350 technology leaders, academics and engineers – those who best understand artificial intelligence – have signed a dramatic declaration, warning that AI could pose a global threat to humanity on the scale of pandemics and nuclear wars . But who is listening?
OpenAI argued in court last summer in two similar copyright infringement lawsuits that training AI systems using copyrighted material constituted use fair content.
Several companies that use generative AI – including Meta Platforms and Stability AI – are facing similar lawsuits from writers, visual artists and source code editors.
