The New York Times initiated legal action against Open AI and Microsoft, accusing the platform of engaging in “unlawful reproduction and utilization of The Times’s highly valuable content” through the extraction of material from the publication to feed automated chatbots.
The lawsuit alleges that the defendants are attempting to capitalize on The Times’s significant journalistic investment by leveraging it to develop substitute products without authorization or compensation.
While there are ongoing legal disputes involving prominent content creators such as Sarah Silverman, John Grisham, and Getty Images, this marks the first instance of a major media entity suing an AI platform.
Filed today in the District Court of the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit demands the removal of robots and training models that incorporate copyrighted material from The Times, along with the payment of “billions of dollars in legal and actual damages” by Open AI and its supporter, Microsoft.
As per the lawsuit, The Times’s work is the result of the efforts of a substantial and costly organization that provides legal, security, and operational backing, along with journalists who ensure the media meets stringent standards of accuracy and fairness. The defendants’ unauthorized use of this work to develop AI products that directly compete with The Times jeopardizes the newspaper’s ability to deliver its services.
Numerous copyrighted articles, in-depth analyses, editorials, commentaries, instructional pieces, and more from The Times were duplicated and utilized to construct AI resources based on large-language models (LLMs). Despite drawing from various sources, the plaintiffs placed particular emphasis on The Times’s content in developing their LLMs.
Chatbots are trained on extensive datasets within the field of conceptual AI, spearheaded by Microsoft’s Open AI. The lawsuit alleges that the application leverages The Times’s content without compensation to create products that serve as substitutes for The Times, deceiving consumers.
Furthermore, The Authors Guild, along with literary figures like John Grisham, George R. Martin, Michael Connelly, and Jodi Picoult, filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, asserting that their works are being infringed upon by the platform.
Another group of authors, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon and Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, lodged a class action lawsuit against Meta in federal court, alleging that their works were “copied and assimilated” to train its LLaMA AI software.
The lawsuit highlights concerns regarding educational data for AI programs aimed at generating coherent responses to user queries. The defendants are accused of training their systems “by duplicating vast amounts of text and extracting meaningful data from it,” without obtaining consent from authors like Sarah Silverman for the use of their works in Meta’s LLaMA program.
