New York Times Sues OpenAI, Microsoft for Alleged Copyright Infringement

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Facts

  • The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, as well as Microsoft, which invests in and supplies the chatbot through its Azure cloud computing technology, on Wednesday, alleging 'billions of dollars' in losses due to the 'unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.'1
  • The suit claims that the companies' artificial intelligence (AI) products, including Microsoft's Copilot, were trained using millions of pieces of New York Times content; this, the lawsuit alleges, has drawn would-be readers away from the newspaper and thus deprived it of advertisement, subscription, and licensing revenue.2
  • The lawsuit, which comes after months of failed commercial negotiations between the paper and the tech companies, further argues that 'Times journalism is the work of thousands of journalists, whose employment costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year' and that Microsoft and OpenAI have 'effectively avoided spending the billions of dollars... by taking it without permission or compensation.'2
  • The Times is one of several media outlets in recent months to block OpenAI's web crawler from scraping its content; others include the BBC, CNN, and Reuters. On the flip side, the parent company of Politico and Business Insider, Axel Springer, made a deal to allow OpenAI to let ChatGPT use both sources' content. The Associated Press also struck a two-year deal allowing OpenAI to use its content.3
  • OpenAI claims its use of copyrighted material falls under a legal doctrine known as fair use. It adds that it utilizes the original works in a 'highly transformative' way and then takes the learned human patterns to create new material different from the original work.4
  • As the media industry grapples with how to deal with emerging AI technology, a growing number of creative professionals, from journalists and artists to musicians and filmmakers, are filing their own lawsuits. These include authors George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Franzen, and George Saunders, as well as 583 news organizations, including The Washington Post and Reuters.5

Sources: 1CNBC, 2The Wall Street Journal, 3Verge, 4FOX News and 5Washington Post.

Narratives

  • Narrative A, as provided by Los Angeles Times. This isn't your typical plagiarism scandal, and anyone who's ever put time and effort into writing something knows that. OpenAI — now a billion-dollar-per-year company — not only steals the hard-earned published works of famous writers and organizations but has also learned to mimic the styles of lesser-known bloggers. If lawmakers can't figure out how to regulate the AI industry, creative professionals will be faced with immediate loss of income and eventual career extinction.
  • Narrative B, as provided by Columbia Journalism Review. No one is arguing that copying works word-for-word is allowed, but there is a more nuanced way of looking at this issue. Just as great authors often read and base their work on others' published books, AI bots read, digest, and transform content they find online. If AI companies are caught plagiarizing, they should be forced to retract and compensate, but if they simply study human patterns and create novel literature from their newfound knowledge, then they should be treated as any author who's read others' books.

Predictions