MANHATTAN (CN) — Citing the threat of AI technology to high-quality journalism, the New York Times sued tech companies Microsoft and OpenAI on Wednesday over illegally cribbing the newspaper’s legacy journalism to teach the famed ChatGPT chatbot and other generative artificial intelligence tools.
The 69-page civil complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, accuses the artificial intelligence software companies of using millions of articles published by the newspaper to train automated chatbots — Microsoft’s Bing Chat, recently rebranded as Copilot, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT — that are now competing online against the Times as a source of reliable information.
The 170-year-old newspaper accused the West Coast tech industry companies of seeking a "free-ride on The Times’ massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment," according to the complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court.
The paper joins a growing list of people and groups trying to stop OpenAI from using their content.
While the complaint does not name a dollar amount for damages, the New York Times says Microsoft and OpenAI’s use of their intellectual property without payment has been “extremely lucrative.”
The newspaper's complaint mentions the issues raised from large language models — LLMs, which are systems that use statistics to find patterns in written texts to generate material.
“Microsoft’s deployment of Times-trained LLMs throughout its product line helped boost its market capitalization by a trillion dollars in the past year alone," the Times says in its complaint. "And OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT has driven its valuation to as high as $90 billion. Defendants’ GenAI business interests are deeply intertwined, with Microsoft recently highlighting that its use of OpenAI’s ‘best-in-class frontier models’ has generated customers — including ‘leading AI startups’ — for Microsoft’s Azure AI product.”
The New York Times says that ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence systems powered by large language models can generate output that recites Times “content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style, as demonstrated by scores of examples.”
The AI tools also wrongly attribute false information to The Times, the complaint notes.
“If The Times and its peers cannot control the use of their content, their ability to monetize that content will be harmed,” the complaint says. “With less revenue, news organizations will have fewer journalists able to dedicate time and resources to important, in-depth stories, which creates a risk that those stories will go untold. Less journalism will be produced, and the cost to society will be enormous.”
OpenAI, headquartered in San Francisco, was founded as a non-profit in 2015. In 2019, the company restructured and shed its non-profit status.
The company became the face of AI technology with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. That service quickly became immensely popular, with an estimated 100 million monthly users. The chatbot uses artificial intelligence to generate humanlike responses to questions and prompts.
The chatbot has been criticized by some educators, who claim that it can complete students’ homework. Others have criticized it for its ability to generate fake news and disinformation, and even impersonate people.
Susman Godfrey LLP and Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck are representing the paper.
Representatives for OpenAI said Wednesday the company had been engaged in "productive" conversations with the Times that were "moving forward constructively" prior to the lawsuit.
“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," an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. "We’re hopeful that we will find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we are doing with many other publishers.”
At OpenAI’s first major tech showcase last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman promised subscription customers the services of its so-called “copyright shield,” in which OpenAI promises to pay the legal costs incurred by its customers defending against copyright lawsuits tied to the way OpenAI’s models are trained on troves of written works and imagery pulled from the internet.
The dictionary Harper Collins named the initials of artificial intelligence, “AI”, the word of the year for 2023, citing the technology’s rapid development and escalating prominence in global conversation.
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