OpenAI and Microsoft, sued by The New York Times

The New York Times has decided to sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The media accuses both companies of using millions of articles from the publication to train their artificial intelligence models.

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In said lawsuit, The New York Times alleges that GPT-4, the model used by ChatGPT and Copilot to function, “can generate results that copy Times’ content word for word“. According to the media outlet, this deprives them of “revenue from subscriptions, licenses, advertising, and affiliation”.

Last April, the newspaper contacted Microsoft and OpenAI to express the existing concern about the use of this content and thus, be able to explore a “friendly solution”. However, it seems that the conversations did not reach a good outcome. After the failure in communications, The Times finally filed the lawsuit last Wednesday.

According to The Times, the lawsuit does not demand a specific amount of money. However, it does explain that the defendants must be held accountable for the “billions of dollars” they have caused in damages related to the “illegal copying and use of The Times’ unique valuable works“. It also demands that other companies “destroy” all content and training data that use The Times’ copyrighted material.

In the lawsuit, we can read that “the defendants try to take advantage of The Times’ enormous investment in its journalism”, since “they use The Times’ content without paying anything, to create products that replace The Times and steal their audience“.

The New York Times is one of the many media outlets that have blocked OpenAI’s web crawler in recent months. This action prevented the company from continuing to extract content from the web to feed and train its generative models. Other media outlets that have followed suit include the BBC, CNN, and Reuters.

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