New York Times, filed a lawsuit against the ChatGPT creator, OpenAI and Microsoft on the accusations of wrong pursuit of the newspaper’s intellectual property and copyright infringement to train its AI chatbot.
Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images
Microsoft, the prime investor in the AI chatbot creator company, OpenAI, is also responsible for providing it with access to the company’s Azure cloud computing technology.
The New York Times in a lawsuit filed in the District court of Southern District of New York, has accused Microsoft and OpenAI accountable for the losses worth billions of dollars in Statutory and actual damages, against the unlawful duplication of the newspaper’s unique and valuable works.
The Newspaper noted in an email statement that, though it recognizes the power and significance of generative AI for the normal people and its applications in journalism. However, journalistic material should be used with the permission from the original source.
It further noted that, “these tools were built with and continue to use independent journalistic content that is only available because we and our peers reported, edited, and fact-checked it at high cost and with considerable expertise.”
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The Flip Side of Coin
After the New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on the unlawful use of its work and copyright infringement. Media started talking about this topic and it was crucial to get the comments from the other side as well, in pursuit of better understanding of the situation.
Upon asking for the comments, OpenAI’s representative said in a statement that, “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.”
He further mentioned that, “Our ongoing conversations with the New York Times have been productive and were moving forward constructively, so we are surprised and disappointed with this development. We’re hopeful that we will find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we are doing with many other publishers.”
Microsoft’s representative didn’t entertain the requests for comments when they were reached out.
The case filed by the New York Times will be carried by Susman Godfrey, a litigation firm which is also representing author Julian Sancton and various other writers in a separate case that has similar accusations of copyright infringement against Microsoft and OpenAI.
Susman Godfrey had previously represented Dominion Voting System in a defamation case against the Fox News that resulted in a settlement worth $787.5 million.
Mass Level Infringements
The New York Times is one of the numerous media agencies and content creators that have accused AI firms, for the alleged usage of their content to train advanced AI learning models without their permission.
ChatGPT, created by OpenAI is a large language-based AI model that produces humanlike content as per the user’s requirements, known as prompts. To train its AI model, OpenAI uses multitudes of information from the internet, which is obtained from the public domain until 2021.
On various occasions, content creators and media agencies have identified their material being used by AI tools like ChatGPT, MidJourney, Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. At times, the content that pops up on the AI tools is the exact same as the original source.
Recently, OpenAI following these concerns has made a partnership with Axel Springer, the parent company of various media firms like Politico, Business Insider, and other European news outlets, to use their content in exchange for a fee.
Content creators and publishers have expressed their concerns on various occasions that, with the advent of generative AI tools, very few people will be clicking on the news sites, resulting in a shrinking traffic and revenues.
