The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in an increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.
The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular AI platforms, over copyright issues related to its written works. The case, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattanargues that the millions of articles published by The Times have been used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.
The suit did not include an exact monetary demand. But it says the defendants should be liable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of distinctively valuable works of The Times.” It also called on companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that used copyrighted material from The Times.
Microsoft declined to comment on the case. OpenAI did not immediately comment.
The lawsuit could test the emerging legal contours of generative AI technologies — called for the text, images and other content they can create after learning from large data sets — and could carry big implications for news industry. The Times is among a handful of outlets that have built successful business models from online journalism, but dozens of newspapers and magazines have been troubled by the shift of readers to the internet.
At the same time, OpenAI and other AI tech firms — which use many types of online text, from newspaper articles to poems to screenplays, to training chatbots — are attracting billions of billion dollars in funding.
OpenAI is now valued by investors at more than $80 billion. Microsoft gave $13 billion to OpenAI and integrated the company’s technology into its Bing search engine.
“Defendants seek to free ride on The Times’ massive investment in its journalism,” the complaint says, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of “using The Times’ content gratuitously to create products that are substitutes for The Times and steal audiences from it.”
The defendants did not have an opportunity to respond to the court.
Concerns about the gratuitous use of intellectual property by AI systems have permeated the creative industries, given the technology’s ability to mimic natural language and generate sophisticated written responses to almost any prompt. .
Actress Sarah Silverman joined a pair of lawsuits in July accusing Meta and OpenAI of “eating” her memoir as a training text for AI programs. Novelists expressed alarm when it was revealed that AI systems had acquired tens of thousands of books, leading to a lawsuit by authors including Jonathan Franzen and John Grisham. Getty Images, the photography syndicate, is suing an AI company that generates images based on written prompts, saying the platform relies on the unauthorized use of Getty’s copyrighted visual materials.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday appears to follow an impasse in negotiations involving The Times, Microsoft and OpenAI. In its complaint, The Times said it approached Microsoft and OpenAI in April to express concerns about the use of its intellectual property and to explore “an amicable resolution” – possibly involving a commercial agreement and ” technological guardrails” around generative AI products – but those talks have not reached a resolution.
Besides seeking to protect intellectual property, The Times’ lawsuit casts ChatGPT and other AI systems as potential competitors in the news business. When chatbots are asked questions about current events or other newsworthy topics, they can generate answers that rely on past journalism by The Times. The newspaper expressed concern that readers would be satisfied with a response from a chatbot and refuse to visit The Times website, thus reducing web traffic that could translate into advertising and subscription revenue.
The complaint cites several examples when a chatbot provided users with verbatim excerpts from Times articles that would otherwise require a paid subscription to view. It asserts that OpenAI and Microsoft have placed particular emphasis on using Times journalism to train their AI programs because of the perceived reliability and accuracy of the material.
Media organizations have spent the past year examining the legal, financial and journalistic implications of the boom in generative AI Some news outlets have reached agreements for the use of their journalism: The Associated Press make a licensing deal in July with OpenAI, and Axel Springer, the German publisher that owns Politico and Business Insider, did the same this month. Terms for those agreements were not disclosed.
After announcing the deal with Axel Springer, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company respects “the rights of content creators and owners and believes they should benefit from AI technology,” adding, “We is hopeful that we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to work together in supporting a rich news ecosystem.”
The Times is also researching how to use the nascent technology. The newspaper recently hired an editorial director of artificial intelligence initiatives to establish protocols for the newsroom’s use of AI and examine ways to integrate the technology into corporate journalism.
In one example of how AI systems use The Times material, the suit showed that Browse With Bing, a Microsoft search feature powered by ChatGPT, reproduced almost verbatim results from Wirecutter, the product review site of The Times. The text results from Bing, however, did not link to the Wirecutter article, and they removed the referral links in the text that Wirecutter uses to generate commissions from sales based on its recommendations.
“Decreased traffic to Wirecutter articles and, in turn, decreased traffic to affiliate links leads to a loss of revenue for Wirecutter,” the complaint said.
The lawsuit also highlights the potential damage to The Times’ brand through so-called AI “hallucinations,” a phenomenon in which chatbots insert false information that is then falsely attributed to a source. The complaint cites several cases in which Microsoft’s Bing Chat provided false information purporting to come from The Times, including results for the “15 most heart-healthy foods,” 12 of which were not mentioned in a paper article.
“If The Times and other news organizations cannot produce and protect their independent journalism, there will be a vacuum that no computer or artificial intelligence can fill,” the complaint reads. It added, “Less journalism will be produced, and the cost to society will be enormous.”
The Times has retained the law firm Susman Godfrey as lead outside counsel for the trial. Susman represented Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation suit against Fox News, which resulted in a $787.5 million settlement in April. Susman also filed a proposed class action suit last month against Microsoft and OpenAI on behalf of nonfiction authors whose books and other copyrighted material were used to train the companies’ chatbots.
Benjamin Mullin contributed reporting.
