The New York Times has initiated legal action against two technology companies, Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuit was filed at a Federal District Court in Manhattan, New York on Wednesday.
The complaint contends that OpenAI, the creators of the widely-used chatbot ChatGPT, employed numerous articles from The New York Times to train the AI service without proper authorization, as reported by The New York Times.
Microsoft is named as a defendant due to its substantial investment in OpenAI, exceeding $10 billion. The lawsuit alleges that the defendants are attempting to leverage The Times’s significant investment in journalism without permission or payment to develop substitute products.
Court documents reveal that ChatGPT sometimes generates “verbatim excerpts” from New York Times articles when queried about current global events. The legal action asserts that attempts to achieve an amicable resolution with the defendants have been ongoing since April 2023. However, these efforts proved unsuccessful as OpenAI contended that the newspaper’s materials were deemed “fair use” for transformative purposes.
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The lawsuit argues, “There is nothing ‘transformative’ about using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it. The outputs of Defendants’ GenAI models compete with and closely mimic the inputs used to train them, copying Times works for that purpose is not fair use.”
This recent legal action is one of several lawsuits against OpenAI. In September, notable U.S. authors, including George R.R. Martin, filed a similar lawsuit, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully utilized their copyrighted works to train the chatbot, generating content that closely resembled human-created material.