New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for ‘billions’

OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, is being sued by the New York Times, a news organization based in the United States, for allegedly infringing on its copyright to train the system.

According to the statement made in the case, which also includes Microsoft as a defendant, the companies should be held accountable for “billions of dollars” in losses sustained.

It is possible for ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) to “learn” by analyzing a vast quantity of data, which is frequently obtained from the internet.

Additionally, OpenAI and Microsoft have been contacted by the BBC for comment.

The complaint asserts that ChatGPT has been used to make ChatGPT smarter without the authorization of the New York Times and that the tool is now competing with the newspaper as a reliable source of information. The lawsuit says that “millions” of stories published by the New York Times were utilized.

The report asserts that ChatGPT would occasionally create “verbatim excerpts” from stories published in the New York Times when it is queried about current events. These excerpts are not available to the public without a paid membership to the publication.

The complaint indicates that readers can obtain material from the New York Times without having to pay for it. This implies that the newspaper is missing out on money from subscriptions as well as advertising clicks from those who visit its website.

As an additional illustration, it provided the example of the Bing search engine, which is powered by ChatGPT for some features, returning results that were obtained from a website owned by the New York Times. However, the search engine did not link to the article or include referral links, which are used to earn revenue.

Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI is greater than $10 billion, which is equivalent to $7.8 billion.

The complaint, which was submitted on Wednesday in a federal court in Manhattan, shows that the New York Times attempted to seek “an amicable resolution” over its copyright in April but was unable to do so.

Many different lawsuits

It comes one month after OpenAI went through a period of instability, during which co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was fired, and then rehired, within the space of a few days.

Insiders in the sector were taken aback by his dismissal, which resulted in employees threatening to leave in large numbers if he was not restored.

However, in addition to the problems that have been occurring within the company, it is also dealing with several lawsuits that were brought in the year 2023.

In September, a collection of authors from the United States, including George R. R. Martin, the author of Game of Thrones, and John Grisham, filed a complaint alleging that they had violated the copyright of another author.

This follows the filing of a lawsuit by comedian Sarah Silverman in July, as well as the signing of an open letter by authors Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman in the same month, which demanded that artificial intelligence corporations compensate them for utilizing their work or other intellectual property.

Additionally, OpenAI is being sued by Microsoft and the programming website GitHub by a group of computer scientists who claim that their code was used to train an artificial intelligence system known as Copilot without their consent. Copilot is the subject of the complaint.

In addition to these actions, there have been numerous cases brought against developers of so-called generative AI, which is an artificial intelligence that can create media based on text prompts. In January, artists filed lawsuits against text-to-image generators Stability AI and Midjourney, claiming that these generators can only function properly if they are trained on copyrighted artwork.

As of right now, none of these legal disputes have been settled.

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