American daily newspaper, The New York Times, has sued two tech companies – Microsoft and OpenAI over claims of copyright infringement.
Filed at a Federal District Court in Manhattan, New York on Wednesday, the suit claims that OpenAI, the creators of popular chatbot ChatGPT, had used several articles from the newspaper to train the AI service without due authorization, The New York Times reports.
Microsoft is listed as a defendant as it is one of the biggest investors for the AI company. Already, the software maker has invested over $10 billion in OpenAI.
The suit accused the defendants of seeking “to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.”
According to the court documents, ChatGPT would sometimes produce “verbatim excerpts” from New York Times’ articles when it was asked about current events in the world.
It was also stated in the suit that efforts have been made to reach “an amicable resolution” with the defendants since April, 2023. However these efforts were unsuccessful as OpenAI claimed that the newspaper’s materials were considered “fair use,” and could be use for transformative purposes.
The suit read in part, “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.”
The newly filed suit is one of several against OpenAI. In September, prominent writers in the United States including Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, filed a similar suit against OpenAI, alleging that the company illegally used their copyrighted works in training the chatbot to generate more human-like material.
