One of the country’s largest newspapers is suing two tech companies over what the paper says are massive violations of its copyrighted material used to train artificial intelligence engines.
The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in the Federal District Court in Manhattan on Wednesday, accusing the tech companies of exploiting millions of Times articles to train their AI chatbots. The Times’ lawsuit marks the first from a major media outlet over AI engines designed to scrape the web for information to respond to prompts in real-time, according to the NYT.
The NYT’s lawsuit says that Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT exploited reporting by the Times to create a rival service that has cost the newspaper “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” through the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”
“Times journalism is the work of thousands of journalists, whose employment costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year,” the NYT’s lawsuit says, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Defendants have effectively avoided spending the billions of dollars that The Times invested in creating that work by taking it without permission or compensation.”
Tech companies developing AI engines have argued in the past that information on the internet is fair to use to train their programs under “fair use” legal exemptions to copyrighted material, according to WSJ. The Times in its lawsuit says that “fair use” does not apply in this situation because the AI engines are capable of taking chunks of text from Times articles and copying it verbatim into responses from prompts.
Danielle Coffey, the CEO of the news publishing trade group News/Media Alliance, told WSJ that the tension between news outlets and AI generative engines is possible to be resolved “if approached as a collaboration.”
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“The New York Times put a very strong stake in the ground that demonstrates the value and importance of protecting news content,” Coffey said. “Quality journalism and these new technologies, especially those that compete for the very same audience, can complement each other if approached as a collaboration.”
The U.S. Copyright Office announced in August that it is investigating the use of artificial intelligence over copyright issues.
“This study will collect factual information and policy views relevant to copyright law and policy. The Office will use this information to analyze the current state of the law, identify unresolved issues, and evaluate potential areas for congressional action,” the agency said on its website.