The New York Times On Wednesday, it filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies’ artificial intelligence models violated the newspaper’s intellectual property.
The complaintconsulted by VOA, claims that AI models created by OpenAI and Microsoft used “millions of The temperature“Copyrighted news articles” to train chatbots that now compete with the newspaper as a news source.
The lawsuit marks the first time a major U.S. media outlet has sued the companies behind the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT and other AI tools. The case also highlights questions that have proliferated at news organizations over the past year regarding the journalistic, financial and legal implications of generative AI.
Although the lawsuit does not mention a specific monetary demand, it says the defendants should be held liable for “billions of dollars in statutory or actual damages.”
“The accused seek to profit The temperature“Microsoft’s massive investment in its journalism,” the complaint states, asserting that OpenAI and Microsoft “use The temperature‘s without payment to create products that replace the Times and steal audiences.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company respects “the rights of content creators and owners and is 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 to find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we do with many other publishers,” the spokesperson added.
In his complaint, the Times said it contacted Microsoft and OpenAI in the spring to express concerns about the use of its intellectual property, but that those conversations were unsuccessful.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to emails from VOA seeking comment.
A similar suit was filed in September by more than a dozen prominent authors, including John Grishman and Elin Hilderbrand. The authors sued OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement by using their books to train ChatGPT without permission.
The media’s fight against the “big tech industry” is also taking place in other countries. More than 80 Spanish media outlets are filing a $600 million lawsuit against Meta for what they consider unfair competition, VOA reported earlier this month.
A Meta spokesperson at the time said the company had not received any legal documents and was therefore unable to comment.
And in November, Google and the Canadian government reached an Online News Act deal, in which Google would continue to use Canadian news online in exchange for annual payments of about $100 million to news companies. .
AI technology has posed ethical and practical questions for media companies over the past 12 months.
Some, including the Associated Press and the German company Axel Springer which publishes Policy And Business Insider have entered into agreements with OpenAI.
But around 600 media companies have installed blockers to try to prevent the technology from accessing content for free.
“What we’re seeing here is that news publishers, at least half of them in my survey, want to curb this a little bit and not allow themselves to be included in this without some sort of conversation or negotiation with the Open. AI company,” Ben Welsh, news applications editor for Reuters who compiled a survey of news organizations for his media blog, told VOA earlier this year.
