NY Times sues Microsoft, OpenAI over bot training
Newspaper says its stories were used to teach AI, violating lucrative copyrights
NEW YORK — The New York Times has filed a federal lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft seeking to end the practice of using its stories to train chatbots, saying that copyright infringements at the paper alone could be worth billions.
The paper joins a growing list of individuals and publishers trying to stop OpenAI from using copyrighted material.
In the suit filed Wednesday in Manhattan federal court, the Times said OpenAI and Microsoft are advancing their technology through the “unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it” and “threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service.”
OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Media organizations have been pummeled by a migration of readers to online platforms, and while many publications have carved out a digital space online as well, artificial intelligence technology has threatened to upend numerous industries, including media.
Artificial intelligence companies scrape information available online, including articles published by news organizations, to train generative AI chatbots. The large language models are also trained on a huge trove of other human-written materials, such as instructional manuals and digital books.
Microsoft has a partnership with OpenAI that allows it to capitalize on the AI technology made by the artificial intelligence company. The Redmond, Washington, tech giant is also OpenAI’s biggest backer and has invested billions of dollars into the company since the two began their partnership in 2019 with a $1 billion investment. As part of the agreement, Microsoft’s supercomputers help power OpenAI’s AI research and the tech giant integrates the startup’s technology into its products.
The paper’s complaint comes as the number of lawsuits filed against OpenAI for copyright infringement is growing. The company has been sued by a number of writers who say their books were ingested to train OpenAI’s AI models without their permission. In June, more than 4,000 writers signed a letter to the CEOs of OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and other AI developers accusing them of exploitative practices in building chatbots that “mimic and regurgitate” their language, style and ideas.
The Times did not list specific damages that it is seeking, but said the legal action “seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”
In the complaint, the Times said Microsoft and OpenAI “seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investments in its journalism” by using it to build products without payment or permission.
In July, OpenAI and The Associated Press announced a deal for the artificial intelligence company to license AP’s archive of news stories. The Times said it has never given permission to anyone to use its content for generative AI purposes.