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The New York Times filed a federal lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft seeking to end the practice of using its published material to train chatbots.
Mark Lennihan/AP
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Mark Lennihan/AP
The New York Times filed a federal lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft seeking to end the practice of using its published material to train chatbots.
Mark Lennihan/AP
The New York Times defendant OpenAI and its biggest backer, Microsoft, charged Wednesday with copyright infringement, alleging that ChatGPT’s creator used the newspaper’s material without permission to train the popular chatbot.
In August, NPR reported that the lawyers of OpenAI and the Times were locked in tense licensing negotiations that had become acrimonious, with the Times threatening legal action to protect unauthorized use of their stories, which were used to generate ChatGPT responses in response to users’ questions.
And now the newspaper has done just that.
OpenAI has said that using news articles is “fair use”
In Costumelawyers of the Times stated that it was looking for a “fair value” in its conversations with OpenAI about the use of its content, but both parties could not reach an agreement.
OpenAI leaders have insisted that their mass mining of large swaths of the Internet, including articles from the TimesIt is protected under a legal doctrine known as “fair use.”
Allows material to be reused without permission in certain cases, including for research and teaching.
Courts have said that fair use of a copyrighted work must generate something new that is “transformative,” or comments or references to an original work, something that Times argues does not apply to how OpenAI reproduces the original reports in the article.
“There is nothing ‘transformative’ about using unpaid Times content to create products that replace the Times and steal its audience,” Times lawyers wrote in the lawsuit Wednesday.
Lawsuit seeks compensation for alleged illegal copying
The lawsuit seeks to hold OpenAI and Microsoft liable for the “billions of dollars in legal and actual damages they owe for the illegal copying and use” of the Times‘articles. Furthermore, the Times’ The legal team is asking a court to order the destruction of all large language model data sets, including ChatGPT, that depend on the publication’s copyrighted works.
OpenAI and Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
Some news publishers have been wary of partnering with tech companies after becoming reliant on online traffic generated through search and social media, only to see Big Tech back away from news distribution in the media. last years. At the same time, the tech industry continued to rake in huge sums of money on online advertising, while the news industry struggled.
Media executives don’t want to repeat the same pattern with AI, and the Times’ legal battle with OpenAI could have wide ramifications for the entire digital publishing industry.
He Times is the first major media organization to take OpenAI to court over the thorny and still unresolved question of whether AI companies violated intellectual property law by training AI models with copyrighted material.
In recent months, OpenAI has tried to contain the conflict through licensing deals with publishers, including the Associated Press and German media conglomerate Axel Springer, which publishes Business Insider and Politico.
He Times’ The lawsuit joins a growing number of legal actions filed against OpenAI for copyright infringement. Writers, comedians, artists and others have filed complaints against the tech company, saying OpenAI models illegally used their material without permission.
Another notable issue in the Times’ An example is ChatGPT’s tendency to “hallucinate” or produce information that sounds credible but is actually completely made up.
lawyers for Times They say ChatGPT sometimes misquotes the newspaper, claiming it reported things that were never reported, causing the newspaper “commercial and competitive harm.”
These so-called “hallucinations” can be amplified to millions when technology companies incorporate chatbot responses into search engine results, as Microsoft is already doing with its Bing search engine.
The newspaper’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit: “Users who ask a search engine what The Times has written on a topic should not receive an unauthorized copy or inaccurate forgery of a Times article.”
