The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement over the unauthorized use of published works to train artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, claims that millions of articles published by the New York Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news media as a source of information.
While the lawsuit does not specify monetary damages, it states that the defendants should be held liable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of the Times’ exceptionally valuable works.”
It also requires companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use the newspaper’s copyrighted material. According to the “New York Times” Microsoft and OpenAI have not yet released any comments.
“Defendants seek to take advantage of the Times’ enormous investment in its journalism”
Investors currently value OpenAI at more than 80 billion dollars (around 72 billion euros). In Microsoft’s case, it has allocated $13 billion (€11.6 million) to OpenAI and incorporated the company’s technology into its Bing search engine.
“Defendants seek to take advantage of the Times’ enormous investment in its journalism,” the lawsuit states, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of “using Times content without payment to create products that replace the Times and steal audiences.”
In its complaint, the newspaper explains that last April it contacted Microsoft and OpenAI to raise concerns about the use of its intellectual property and explore “an amicable solution”, but that the conversations did not reach any agreement.
In addition to seeking to protect intellectual property, the lawsuit presents ChatGPT and other AI systems as “potential competitors in the news industry,” so the paper expresses concern that readers will settle for a chatbot’s response and opt out to visit The New York. Times, thereby reducing web traffic that can translate into advertising and subscription revenue.
concrete examples
The complaint cites several examples in which a chatbot provided users with near-verbatim excerpts of newspaper articles that would otherwise require a subscription to read. One such example comes from Browse with Bing, a Microsoft search feature based on ChatGPT, which reproduces results from Wirecutter, the New York Times product review site, almost word for word.
However, Bing’s text results did not link to the Wirecutter article and removed the referral links in the text that Wirecutter uses to generate sales commissions based on its recommendations, the lawsuit adds. “Decreased traffic to Wirecutter articles and, consequently, decreased traffic to affiliate links subsequently lead to a loss of revenue for Wirecutter,” the complaint details.
The lawsuit also highlights “the potential harm” to the New York Times brand through so-called artificial intelligence “hallucinations,” a phenomenon in which chatbots input false information that is then misattributed to a source. The complaint cites several instances in which Microsoft’s Bing Chat provided incorrect information that it said came from the newspaper, including results for “the 15 heart-healthiest foods,” 12 of which were not mentioned in a newspaper article.
“Less journalism will be produced and the cost to society will be enormous”
“If the New York Times and other news organizations fail to produce and protect their independent journalism, it will create a void that no computer or artificial intelligence can fill,” the complaint continues, warning: “Less journalism will be produced and the costs for the company will be huge.
The newspaper has hired law firm Susman Godfrey as its lead outside counsel for the litigation. Godfrey represented Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation case against Fox News, which ended in a $787.5 million settlement last April. It also filed a proposed class action lawsuit last month against Microsoft and OpenAI on behalf of several nonfiction authors whose books and copyrighted material were used to train the companies’ chatbots.
2023-12-28 16:53:33
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