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The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Wednesday for copyright infringement, opening a new front in an increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.
The Times is the first major US media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPIT and other popular AI platforms, over copyright issues involving their written works. The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, argues that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with news outlets as sources of reliable information.
The lawsuit does not include an exact monetary demand. 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 on the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times.
In its complaint, The Times said it contacted Microsoft and OpenAI in April to raise concerns about the use of its intellectual property and to explore an “amicable solution”, possibly including a commercial agreement and the sale of generic AI products. “Technical guardrails” were included around the area. But he said no solution emerged from the talks.
OpenAI spokeswoman Lindsay Held said in a statement that the company was “moving forward constructively” in negotiations with The Times and that she was “surprised and disappointed” by the lawsuit.
“We respect the rights of content creators and owners and are committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models,” Ms Held said. “We hope we will find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we are doing with many other publishers.”
Microsoft declined to comment on the matter.
The lawsuit could test the emerging legal framework of generative AI technologies – the so-called text, images and other content they can create after learning from large data sets – and carry major implications for the news industry. The Times is one of the few outlets that has created a successful business model from online journalism, but dozens of newspapers and magazines have been affected by the migration of readers to the Internet.
At the same time, OpenAI and other AI tech companies — which use a variety of online texts, from newspaper articles to poems to screenplays to train chatbots — are attracting billions of dollars in funding.
OpenAI is now valued by investors at more than $80 billion. Microsoft has pledged $13 billion for OpenAI and has incorporated the company’s technology into its Bing search engine.
“Defendants sought to take advantage of The Times’s substantial investment in journalism,” the complaint says. The complaint accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of “using The Times content without payment to create products that replace The Times and drive audiences away from it.”
The defendants have not had an opportunity to respond in court.
Given the technology’s ability to mimic natural language and generate sophisticated written responses to virtually any prompt, concerns about noncompensable use of intellectual property by AI systems have grown through the creative industries.
Actress Sarah Silverman joined a pair of lawsuits in July, accusing Meta and OpenAI of “swallowing” her memoir as a training text for AI programs. When it was discovered that the AI system had absorbed thousands of books, novelists expressed concern, leading to a lawsuit by authors including Jonathan Franzen and John Grisham. Getty Images, a photography syndicate, sued an AI company that generates images based on written prompts, saying the platform relies on unauthorized use of Getty’s copyrighted visual content.
The limits of copyright law often receive new scrutiny at moments of technological change – such as the advent of broadcast radio or digital file-sharing programs like Napster – and the use of artificial intelligence is emerging as the latest frontier.
“The Supreme Court’s decision is essentially inevitable,” Richard Tofel, former president of the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica and a news business consultant, said of the latest flurry of lawsuits. “Some publishers will compromise for the time being – including possibly The Times – but many publishers will not want the pressure that would be required to resolve this new and important issue of copyright law.”
Microsoft has already acknowledged potential copyright concerns over its AI products. In September, the company announced that if customers using its AI tools faced copyright complaints, it would compensate them and cover related legal costs.
Other voices in the technology industry have been more assertive in their approach to copyright. In October, Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm and early supporter of OpenAI, wrote in comments to the U.S. Copyright Office that exposing AI companies to copyright liability would “either hinder or significantly impair their growth.”
“The result is likely to be much less competition, much less innovation, and the loss of the United States’ position as a leader in global AI development,” the investment firm said in its statement.
In addition to seeking to protect intellectual property, The Times’ lawsuit casts ChatGPT and other AI systems as potential competitors in the news business. When chatbots are asked about current events or other newsworthy topics, they can generate answers that draw on The Times’ journalism. The newspaper expresses concern that readers will be satisfied with the chatbot’s response and refuse to visit The Times’ website, thus reducing web traffic that could be translated into advertising and subscription revenue.
The complaint cites several instances when a chatbot provided users with almost verbatim excerpts of Times articles that would otherwise have required a paid subscription to view. It claims that OpenAI and Microsoft placed special emphasis on the use of Times journalism in the training of their AI programs because of the perceived credibility and accuracy of the content.
Media organizations have spent the last year examining the legal, financial and journalistic implications of the surge in generic AI. Some news outlets have already reached agreements to use it for their journalism: The Associated Press struck a licensing deal with OpenAI and Axel Springer in July. The German publisher, which owns Politico and Business Insider, did the same this month. The terms of those agreements were not disclosed.
The Times is exploring how to use the budding technology. The newspaper recently hired an editorial director of its artificial intelligence initiative to establish protocols for the use of AI in the newsroom and examine ways to integrate the technology into the company’s journalism.
In an example of how AI systems use content from The Times, the suit revealed that Browse with Bing, a Microsoft search feature powered by ChatGPT, reproduced results almost verbatim from The Times’ product review site Wirecutter. . However, Bing’s text results did not link to the Wirecutter article, and they removed the referral link in the text, which Wirecutter uses to generate commissions from sales based on its recommendations.
“Wirecutter suffered a loss of revenue due to the reduction in traffic to Wirecutter articles and the resulting reduction in traffic to affiliate links,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit also highlights the potential damage caused to The Times’ brand through so-called AI “hallucinations,” a phenomenon in which chatbots insert false information that is then falsely attributed to a source. The complaint cites several instances in which Microsoft’s Bing Chat provided inaccurate information that it said came from the Times, including results for the “15 Most Heart-Healthy Foods”, Of which 12 were not mentioned in a newspaper article.
“If The Times and other news organizations cannot produce and protect their independent journalism, there will be a void that no computer or artificial intelligence can fill,” the complaint said. It further states, “Less journalism will be produced, and the cost to society will be much higher.”
The Times has retained the law firms Sussman Godfrey & Rothwell, Feig, Ernst & Manbeck as outside counsel for the lawsuit. Suzman represented Dominion Voting Systems in a defamation case against Fox News, which resulted in a $787.5 million settlement in April. Sussman also filed a proposed class action lawsuit last month against Microsoft and OpenAI on behalf of nonfiction authors whose books and other copyrighted materials were used to train the companies’ chatbots.
Benjamin Mullin Contributed to the reporting.
