Software

New York Times sues OpenAI for copyright issues

The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against Open.ai and Microsoft, alleging that the firms used copyrighted materials in training their chatbots.

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December 28, 2023

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for creating AI tools that copy its copyrighted content, according to a report from the Washington Post. The lawsuit claims that the firms trained AI tools ChatGPT and Copilot (formerly known as Bing Chat) with millions of articles protected under copyright.

"Our ongoing conversations with the New York Times have been productive and moving forward constructively, so we are surprised and disappointed with this development," Lindsey Held, spokesperson for OpenAI, said in the report.

According to the report, the New York Times has cited examples where chat prompts have been answered by AI tools with word-for-word regurgitation of article content.

"Defendants' unlawful use of The Times's work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times's ability to provide that service," the text of the lawsuit reads. "Defendants' generative artificial intelligence ('GenAI') tools rely on large-language models ('LLMs') that were built by copying and using millions of The Times's copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides and more.

"While defendants engaged in widescale copying from many sources, they gave Times content particular emphasis when building their LLMs — revealing a preference that recognizes the value of those works. 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."

According to the New York Times report on the lawsuit, damages have not been fully outlined in the suit by the plaintiff in the filing.

"The suit does not include an exact monetary demand," the report said. "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."