The NYT is the first major US media organization to sue OpenAI — the company that created the popular artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT — and Microsoft — an OpenAI investor and creator of the AI platform now known as Copilot — over copyright issues related to their works.
Photo: Reuters
Many authors and other groups have also sued tech companies to limit the automated data collection or data collection by AI services of their online content without paying.
The NYT's complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of trying to "exploit The Times's enormous investment in its journalism" by using it to provide information to readers.
The NYT did not provide a specific figure for the damages, but estimated them to be in the “billions of dollars.” They also want OpenAI and Microsoft to destroy their chatbot models and document-matching training sets.
The 172-year-old newspaper said talks aimed at stopping a lawsuit and allowing a "mutually beneficial exchange of value" with the defendants had failed.
However, OpenAI said: “We respect the rights of creators and content owners. Our ongoing conversations with the New York Times have been productive and constructive, so we are surprised and disappointed by this development.”
AI companies that collect online data to train innovative AI chatbots have attracted billions of dollars in investment. Investors have valued OpenAI at more than $80 billion.
While OpenAI's parent company is a nonprofit, Microsoft has invested $13 billion in a for-profit subsidiary, in which its ownership stake will be 49%.
Novelists including David Baldacci, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham and Scott Turow have also sued OpenAI and Microsoft in Manhattan federal court, claiming that AI systems may have illegally used tens of thousands of their books.
In July, comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors sued OpenAI and Meta in San Francisco for “stealing” their work, including Silverman’s 2010 book “The Bedwetter.” A judge dismissed most of that lawsuit in November.
AI chatbots have complicated the struggle of news and media organizations to retain their dwindling readership, even though the NYT is still doing well and has a steady income.
The New York Times ended September with 9.41 million digital subscribers, up from 8.59 million a year earlier, while print subscribers fell from 740,000 to 670,000.
Subscriptions generate more than two-thirds of the NYT's revenue, while advertising only generates about 20% of revenue.
The New York Times lawsuit cites several instances in which OpenAI and Microsoft chatbots provided users with near-verbatim excerpts of their articles, including a 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning series about predatory lending in New York City’s taxi industry.
The New York Times said such violations threaten high-quality journalism by reducing reader demand for its sites, potentially cutting into advertising revenue and subscriptions.
The NYT also said that AI chatbots make it harder for readers to distinguish fact from fiction: “In AI parlance, this is called a ‘hallucination’… In simple terms, it is misinformation.”
Hoang Hai (according to NYT, Reuters, AP)
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