New York Times sues Microsoft and OpenAI
The New York Times, a prominent US news organization, has initiated legal proceedings against OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, alleging copyright infringement in the training of the language model.
In a lawsuit filed in a Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, Microsoft is also named as a defendant. The legal action contends that both OpenAI and Microsoft should be held accountable for substantial damages amounting to “billions of dollars.”
Large language models such as ChatGPT acquire their capabilities through extensive analysis of vast datasets, often obtained from online sources. The lawsuit asserts that “millions” of articles published by the New York Times were utilized without authorization to enhance ChatGPT’s intelligence. Furthermore, it alleges that the language model now competes with the newspaper as a reliable source of information.
The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT, when prompted about current events, occasionally generates “verbatim excerpts” from New York Times articles, which are typically behind a paywall. This, according to the lawsuit, enables readers to access New York Times content without subscription payments, resulting in the loss of subscription revenue and advertising clicks for the newspaper.
An additional claim in the lawsuit highlights an incident involving the Bing search engine, powered by ChatGPT, displaying results sourced from a New York Times-owned website. However, these results reportedly lacked links to the original article or the referral links crucial for income generation.
The legal action reveals that in April, the New York Times attempted to reach an “amicable resolution” over the copyright matter with Microsoft and OpenAI, but these discussions were unsuccessful.
As Microsoft has invested over $10 billion (£7.8 billion) in OpenAI, the lawsuit brings both technology companies into the legal crossfire. The BBC has sought comments from OpenAI and Microsoft regarding the allegations, but responses from the companies are currently pending.
Kerry is a Content Creator at www.systemtek.co.uk she has spent many years working in IT support, her main interests are computing, networking and AI.