New York Times files Billion-Dollar lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over ChatGPT’s alleged copyright infringement
The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement in the training of the language model. The lawsuit asserts that both companies should be held accountable for “billions of dollars” in damages.
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT learn by analyzing vast datasets, often sourced from online content.
The lawsuit claims that «millions» of New York Times articles were used without permission to enhance ChatGPT’s capabilities.
It further argues that ChatGPT competes with the newspaper as a trusted source of information, generating «verbatim excerpts» from New York Times articles when queried about current events.
According to the lawsuit, this practice allows readers to access New York Times content without a subscription, resulting in the loss of subscription revenue and advertising clicks.
Additionally, the lawsuit points out an example involving the Bing search engine, powered by ChatGPT, displaying results from a New York Times-owned website without proper attribution, impacting the site’s revenue.
The New York Times reportedly approached Microsoft and OpenAI in April, seeking an «amicable resolution» over the copyright issues but was unsuccessful.
This legal action follows a period of internal turmoil at OpenAI, including the brief dismissal and subsequent rehiring of CEO Sam Altman.
The company is also facing multiple lawsuits, including a similar copyright infringement case brought by a group of authors, legal action by comedian Sarah Silverman, and a lawsuit related to code usage filed by a group of computing experts.
As these legal battles unfold, the outcomes of these cases remain pending, with no resolutions reached thus far.
