The New York Times on Wednesday slapped ChatGPT creator OpenAI and its chief backer Microsoft with a federal copyright infringement lawsuit — setting up a legal battle that could rein in the emerging technology as publishers fight for survival.
Filed in Manhattan district court, the lawsuit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft used “millions” of copyrighted articles to create artificial intelligence products that compete with and threaten the Gray Lady’s ability to provide that service.
“Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as “Copilot”) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment,” the lawsuit asserts.
The Times’ lawsuit — the first by a major media organization against OpenAI and Microsoft — is seeking unspecified damages and wants the court to order the “destruction” of all GPT and “large-language models” that were trained using its work.
The newspaper “seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages,” the complaint said.
The Times’ lawsuit is the first by a major media organization against OpenAI and Microsoft. AP
OpenAI and Microsoft have yet to respond to the lawsuit.
The companies did not immediately return The Post’s request for comment.
The complaint alleges OpenAI and Microsoft’s AI products used proprietary articles in its responses and diverted traffic that would otherwise go to the Times’ web properties — depriving the company of advertising, licensing and subscription revenue.
The Times’ legal team cited multiple examples in which ChatGPT regurgitated from its articles “verbatim,” including a lengthy investigation of Apple and the New York City taxi industry.
“Times journalism is the work of thousands of journalists, whose employment costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year,” the Times said in its complaint. “Defendants have effectively avoided spending the billions of dollars that The Times invested in creating that work by taking it without permission or compensation.”
While OpenAI’s parent is a non-profit company, Microsoft has invested $13 billion in a for-profit subsidiary.
The New York Times’ lawsuit also marks a fresh headache for OpenAI boss Sam Altman. Getty Images for TIME
OpenAI is expected to be valued at more than $80 billion at the conclusion of a hotly anticipated share sale.
The suit was lodged after months of negotiations between the companies failed to produce a deal, according to the Times.
It is the latest sign of growing backlash from media outlets, authors and other creatives as tech giants use endless reams of internet data to “train” their AI models. Critics fear that the rise of chatbots and other AI tools will further erode revenue within the struggling journalism sector – or even render creative fields obsolete.
In September, a coalition of authors including “Game of Thrones” creator George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult and John Grisham sued OpenAI for allegedly using their copyrighted works without permission. Their suit alleged that the “success and profitability of OpenAI are predicated on mass copyright infringement.”
The New York Times asked a federal court to hold Microsoft and OpenAI “responsible” for billions in damages. REUTERS
Elsewhere, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson noted in November that The Post’s and the Wall Street Journal’s parent company has “led the quest for compensation for content from the big digital platforms” over the last decade and has “entered a new phase of negotiations with the rise of Generative AI.”
Thomson had previously called out OpenAI’s ChatGPT for exhibiting a left-wing bias and slammed the chatbot’s tendency to spit out gibberish as “rubbish in, rubbish out, rubbish all about.”
Billionaire mogul Barry Diller, the chairman of Dotdash Meredith’s parent company IAC, told Semafor earlier this year that he believes media companies should band together and sue tech giants for using their content to train AI models.
Diller reportedly approached the New York Times to participate in that offer, but the Gray Lady opted not to take him up on it.
The New York Times’ lawsuit also marks a fresh headache for OpenAI boss Sam Altman, who is still smarting from a high-profile spat that led the AI firm’s previous board of directors to fire him last month.
Altman later returned to his post after frantic negotiations that included the departure of all but one of OpenAI’s previous board directors.
The exact reasons for his exit have not been publicly revealed, but a report earlier this month said that senior OpenAI employees had allegedly complained behind the scenes that Altman was “psychologically abusive.”
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/12/27/business/new-york-times-sues-openai-microsoft-for-using-articles-to-train-chatgpt-other-ai-models/