The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for using its published works to train their artificial intelligence tool, ChatGPT, without permission.
The New York Times is the first major American news organization to sue the businesses who created ChatGPT and other prominent A.I. platforms for copyright violations involving its literary works.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, claims that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train computerized chatbots that now compete with the news organization as a legitimate source of information.
The suit does not include an exact monetary demand. But it says the defendants should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”
It also calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times.
The complaints
In the complaints filed by the New York Times, the publishing company raised concerns about the uncompensated use of intellectual property by AI systems and accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using its content without payment to create products that substitute for it and even take its audience away.
- “Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it,” the publication said.
The lawsuit filed on Wednesday follows an impasse in negotiations involving The Times, Microsoft, and OpenAI. In its complaint, The Times said that it approached Microsoft and OpenAI in April to raise concerns about the use of its intellectual property and explore “an amicable resolution” possibly involving a commercial agreement and “technological guardrails” around generative AI products but that the talks did not resolve.
AI as competition to news platforms
Besides seeking to protect intellectual property, the lawsuit by The Times casts ChatGPT and other A.I. systems as potential competitors in the news business.
- It noted that when chatbots are asked about current events or other newsworthy topics, they can generate answers that rely on past journalism by The Times.
- The newspaper expresses concern that readers will be satisfied with a response from a chatbot and decline to visit The Times’s website, thus reducing web traffic that can be translated into advertising and subscription revenue.
- The complaint cites several examples when a chatbot provided users with near-verbatim excerpts from Times articles that would otherwise require a paid subscription to view. It asserts that OpenAI and Microsoft placed particular emphasis on the use of Times journalism in training their A.I. programs because of the perceived reliability and accuracy of the material.