New York Times Files Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Microsoft Over Unauthorized Use of AI Models on Articles

The New York Times sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Microsoft in a US court on Wednesday, alleging that the companies’ powerful AI models used millions of articles for training without permission. With AI bots, the companies “seek to take advantage of The Times’ massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitute products without permission or payment,” the lawsuit said.

With the suit, The New York Times took a more adversarial approach to the sudden rise of AI chatbots, unlike other media groups such as Germany’s Axel Springer or the Associated Press, which have signed content deals with OpenAI.

The Times, one of America’s most respected news organizations, is seeking damages and an order for the companies to stop using its content – and to destroy the data already collected. While the amount is not specifically claimed, the Times claims the breach could have cost “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.”

OpenAI and Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment.

Microsoft, the world’s second-largest company by market capitalization, is a major investor in OpenAI and has been quick to incorporate AI into its own products since the launch of ChatGPT last year. AI models using ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot (formerly Bing) were trained for years on content available on the Internet under the assumption that it was fair use without compensation.

But the suit, filed in federal court in New York, argued that the Times’ illegal use of work to build AI products created a potential competitor and threatened its ability to provide quality journalism.

“These tools were built on, and continue to use, independent journalism and content that is available only because we and our colleagues report, edit and verify it at great expense and with considerable expertise,” a Times spokesman said.

Not “changing”

The Times reported that it tried to seal a content deal with OpenAI and Microsoft, but the companies argued that their technology was “transformational” and therefore did not need a commercial arrangement. According to the lawsuit, the content created by ChatGPT and Copilot closely mimicked the style of the New York Times and that the magazine’s content was given a privileged position in improving chatbot technology.

It also said the content, which turned out to be false, was incorrectly attributed to The New York Times. “There is nothing ‘transformative’ about using content from The Times without payment to create products that will replace The Times and steal its audience,” the lawsuit alleges.

Emerging AI giants are facing a wave of lawsuits over the use of Internet content as they build their AI systems that generate content based on simple prompts.

Last year, Game of Thrones author George RR Martin and other best-selling fiction authors filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the startup of infringing their copyrights to power ChatGPT.

Universal and other music publishers have sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic in a US court for using copyrighted lyrics to train its AI systems and generate answers to user questions.

US photo distributor Getty Images has accused Stability AI of profiting from its and partners’ images to make a visual artificial intelligence that creates original images from a simple request.

As lawsuits pile up, Microsoft and AI player Google have announced they will offer legal protection to customers suing its AI-generated content for copyright infringement.