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Open AI said Monday that a New York Times lawsuit against him was meritless and that he supported and created opportunities for news organizations, while delving deeper into a debate over the unauthorized use of published works to train artificial intelligence technologies.
The times defendant OpenAI and Microsoft on December 27, accusing the companies of infringing their copyright by using millions of their articles to train artificial intelligence technologies such as the ChatGPT chatbot. Chatbots now compete with The Times as a trusted source of information, according to the lawsuit.
In a 1,000-word blog post on Monday, OpenAI said it collaborated with news organizations and had established partnerships with some of them, including The Associated Press. Using copyrighted works to train your technologies is fair use according to law, added the company. The Times lawsuit doesn’t tell the full story of how OpenAI and its technologies operate, he said.
“We look forward to continuing to collaborate with news organizations, helping to elevate their ability to produce quality journalism by harnessing the transformative potential of AI,” the company wrote.
Lindsey Held, a spokesperson for OpenAI, declined to comment further.
The Times was the first major American media organization to sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright issues related to their written works. Other groups, including novelists and computer programmers, have also filed copyright lawsuits against artificial intelligence companies. The demands have been driven by the rise of “generative AI,” technologies that generate text, images and other media from brief prompts.
OpenAI and other AI companies build this technology by feeding it huge amounts of digital data, some of which is likely copyrighted. This has led us to realize that online information (stories, artwork, news articles, forum posts and photographs) can have significant untapped value.
AI companies have long claimed that they can legally use such content to train their technologies without paying for it because the material is public and they do not reproduce it in its entirety.
In its blog post, OpenAI said its discussions with The Times about a possible partnership appeared to be progressing constructively, with one last communication on December 19. During negotiations, he said, The Times had mentioned that it had seen OpenAI’s technology “regurgitate” some of its content, meaning that the technology had generated near-verbatim excerpts from articles published in The Times, but declined to provide examples. When The Times filed a lawsuit eight days later, OpenAI said it was surprised and disappointed.
The Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI said its technology sometimes regurgitates articles, but that this was a “rare bug” that it was working to resolve. The Times’ lawsuit included examples showing ChatGPT reproducing excerpts from its articles almost verbatim.
“Intentionally manipulating our models to regurgitate is not an appropriate use of our technology and is against our terms of use,” OpenAI said.
