Nonprofit Suing OpenAI, Microsoft Over Alleged Copyright Infringement

Facts

• On Thursday, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), the nonprofit that publishes Mother Jones and Reveal, announced a lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright infringement on their AI platforms.¹
• Filed in a federal court in Manhattan, the case accuses OpenAI of exploiting copyrighted content without permission and without offering compensation at the expense of the organization's journalism.²
• CEO Monika Bauerlein further told the Associated Press that such practices are 'dangerous,' claiming that OpenAI is cutting 'the entire foundation of [the] existence [of her group] as an independent newsroom out from under [them].'³
• The suit seeks damages and a court order for OpenAI and Microsoft to delete any copyrighted material from online data sets used to train ChatGPT to respond to queries from its users.⁴
• This suit follows similar ones filed by large news outlets, including The New York Times and The Intercept, and well-known authors. Other outlets, such as The Financial Times and Politico, have signed collaboration deals with OpenAI.⁴

Sources: ¹Verge, ²Associated Press, ³Independent and ⁴Al Jazeera.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by The Hollywood Reporter. The news publishing industry is under siege from companies like OpenAI, and nonprofits like CIR must fight back — even if that means bringing lawsuits. OpenAI knows it should be compensating publishers because it has signed licensing deals with several of them to obtain permission to use their content. OpenAI must be stopped from scraping content that it's not going to pay for.
• Narrative B, as provided by TechCrunch. If generative AI models are going to be successful in improving life, they're going to need a large amount of data. However, no one is arguing that copying works word-for-word is allowed — just as great authors often read and base their work on others' published books, AI bots read, digest, and transform content they find online. An opt-out tool is currently in the works for those who don't want certain pieces of content to be part of the teaching data.

Predictions