The New York Times filed a lawsuit in federal court on Wednesday against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies used the Times’ content to train artificial intelligence (AI) models without permission, infringing the outlet’s copyrights in the process.
The lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York claims that OpenAI, the maker of generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, and its financial backer Microsoft infringed the Times’ copyrights by building training datasets containing millions of copies of its copyrighted content. The outlet also claims that its copyrights were violated by the output of generative AI tools like ChatGPT.
"Defendants’ generative artificial intelligence ("GenAI") rely on large-language models ("LLMs") that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’ copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides and more," the complaint states.
"Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as "Copilot") and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’ massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment," the lawsuit added.
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FOX Business reached out to OpenAI and Microsoft for comment.
The Times’ complaint is the latest of several copyright infringement lawsuits against companies building and marketing AI tools.
A group of authors including Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and noted in late November that they planned to add Microsoft to the suit as a defendant given the tech giant’s ties to OpenAI.
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Separately, comedian Sarah Silverman and another group of authors sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, over its use of their copyrighted content in training at least one of its AI models.
