Update:
- Microsoft and OpenAI claim The New York Times paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products and made tens of thousands of attempts to generate New York Times paragraphs from the artificial intelligence program.
- The companies asked a New York federal judge to dismiss The New York Times’ claims of copyright infringement in AI training, instead stating, “ChatGPT is not in any way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times.”
- Microsoft and OpenAI claim the hacker generated The New York Times paragraphs by “targeting and exploiting a bug” the companies are working to correct in ChatGPT programming.
- “The allegations in the Times’s complaint do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards,” the motion to dismiss says.
New York Times lawsuit overview:
- Who: The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI related to its use of copyrighted stories.
- Why: The New York Times claims OpenAI owes it compensation for using its work to train artificial intelligence program ChatGPT.
- Where: The ChatGPT lawsuit was filed in federal court in New York.
(Jan. 5, 2024)
The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI accusing the companies of using its copyrighted content to build the artificial intelligence (AI) program ChatGPT and profiting off it without compensating the Times.
The newspaper spent a large sum of money over many years to report relevant information to the public that sets the newspaper apart from others, the New York Times lawsuit says.
“Using the valuable intellectual property of others in these ways without paying for it has been extremely lucrative for Defendants,” the OpenAI lawsuit says. “Microsoft’s deployment of Times-trained LLMs (large language models) throughout its product line helped boost its market capitalization by a trillion dollars in the past year alone. And OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT has driven its valuation to as high as $90 billion.”
New York Times asks for compensation, destruction of LLM models
The New York Times reached out to Microsoft and OpenAI in April 2023 to raise its concerns over intellectual property but did not reach an amicable resolution, the Microsoft lawsuit says.
The New York Times seeks statutory and compensatory damages, restitution and relief, as well as the destruction of LLMs including the New York Times’ work and prevention of similar conduct, according to the lawsuit.
Companies such as Microsoft and OpenAI use LLMs to train their AI programs to operate, and, over the past year, groups whose copyrighted material was used to train those programs filed lawsuits over their use in training without consent.
OpenAI and Microsoft face a class action lawsuit claiming they violated copyright laws through the theft of nonfiction authors’ work without permission or compensation.
Do you think the New York Times should be paid for companies using its content for AI chat training? Let us know in the comments.
The plaintiff is represented by Elisha Barron, Ian Crosby, Davida Brook, Ellie Dupler and Tamar Lusztig of Susman Godfrey LLC along with Steven Lieberman, Jennifer B. Maisel and Kristen J. Logan of Rothwell, Figg, Ernst and Manbeck PC.
The New York Times copyright lawsuit is The New York Times Co. v. Microsoft Corp., et al., Case No. 1:23-cv-11195, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
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