Microsoft and OpenAI are facing a lawsuit from popular news publisher New York Times (NYT) as the latter starts a legal fight over generative AI technologies that the two companies are pushing to customers. The new lawsuit may have far-reaching implications for online news publishing businesses.
NYT is saying that tech companies are exploiting content that was published by them without asking for any prior permission to help teach their AI tools. This includes OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot. NYT claims that the two tools are being trained with millions of pieces of Times content and use the learned information to serve answers to users’ prompts.
The suit came after months of commercial negotiations between the companies that eventually failed to produce a deal. NYT said that Microsoft and OpenAI products would drive traffic that would have been made by normal users, “depriving the company of advertising, licensing and subscription revenue.”
NYT is seeking damages, in addition to asking the court to stop the tech companies from using its content on the AI tools, as well as destroying the data sets created by the tools that include the work made by NYT.
“Times journalism is the work of thousands of journalists whose employment costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Defendants have effectively avoided spending the billions of dollars that The Times invested in creating that work by taking it without permission or compensation,” The Times said in its complaint document, which can be read here.
A few publishers, including the Associated Press and Axel Springer, the publisher of sites such as Politico and Business Insider, have reached commercial agreements to license their content to OpenAI while others like Better Homes & Gardens, People and Verywell Health believes publishers’ copyrights are being violated with AI tools.
OpenAI started gaining traction last year with a release of ChatGPT that wowed users by generating humanlike written responses to user queries about pretty much anything—from a salsa recipe to a travel itinerary for Greece to information about historical events.
Microsoft entered the picture as a major partner for OpenAI, agreeing to invest $13 billion (about RM60 billion) in the company in exchange for what is essentially a 49% stake in the earnings of its for-profit arm.
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