The Federal District Court in Manhattan has received a lawsuit filed by The New York Times against Microsoft Corporation and OpenAI.
According to the lawsuit, AI chatbots were trained on the media company’s material without the required authorization.
With “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” as its goal, The New York Times is holding Microsoft and OpenAI accountable for the purported “unlawful copyright and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”
The complaint requests that all chatbot models and data that are sourced from newspaper articles be removed.
The defendants are accused in the case of taking advantage of The Times’s journalistic investment, using its content without permission, and producing goods that devalue and draw readers away from the publication.
According to the Times, the lawsuit was filed after months of talks between the parties ended in no agreement.
It is the most recent example of the growing resistance to tech companies’ exploitation of infinite amounts of internet data to “train” AI models that comes from writers, media outlets, and other creatives. The growing popularity of chatbots and other AI technologies has critics worried that they would further deplete the already precarious news industry’s earnings or maybe make creative disciplines obsolete.
A group of writers, led by George R.R. Martin, the author of “Game of Thrones,” Jodi Picoult, and John Grisham, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in September, alleging that the company had used their intellectual works without their consent. “OpenAI’s success and profitability are predicated on mass copyright infringement,” according to their lawsuit.
