The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the unauthorized use of millions of the newspaper’s articles.
The New York Times logo on a smartphone screen 0 artistic illustration. Image credit: Alpha Photo via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED license
The complaint was issued this Wednesday. It asserts that the content was utilized without permission to train chatbots, specifically OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s AI platform Copilot. This marks the first major legal action by a U.S. media organization against OpenAI.
Microsoft, as an investor in OpenAI, is implicated in the lawsuit.
The legal dispute revolves around copyright concerns related to The New York Times’ intellectual property. Similar concerns have been raised by writers and others seeking to limit the automatic collection of their online content by AI services without due compensation.
The complaint from the newspaper, lodged in the federal court in Manhattan, alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft sought to exploit The New York Times’s substantial investment in journalism, utilizing it to offer alternative information delivery channels to readers.
The New York Times has not specified a particular amount in damages. However, the publication estimates the damages incurred to be in the “billions of dollars.”
Additionally, the newspaper is requesting the companies to discard chatbot models and training sets that incorporate its content. Despite attempts this year to engage in discussions aimed at preventing a lawsuit and facilitating a “mutually beneficial value exchange” with the defendants, no agreement was reached, as per the newspaper’s statement.
The legal action by The New York Times comes seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to revive a challenge to Google’s digital library, which provided access to snippets of text, deeming it fair use of authors’ works.
The presence of chatbots has intensified the competition among prominent media entities to draw and retain readers, with The Times demonstrating relatively stronger performance compared to others.
The legal action by The Times pointed to specific instances where OpenAI and Microsoft chatbots provided users with nearly identical excerpts from its articles.
According to The Times, such unauthorized use poses a threat to high-quality journalism by diminishing readers’ perceived need to visit its website. This, in turn, could lead to reduced traffic and potential impacts on advertising and subscription revenue.
Additionally, the lawsuit asserted that the defendants’ chatbots create challenges for readers in distinguishing between fact and fiction, particularly when the technology erroneously attributes information to the newspaper.
Written by Vytautas Valinskas