On Thursday, eight American newspaper publishers filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI in a federal court in New York.
They accuse the tech giants of unauthorized use and misrepresentation of their content in AI products.
This legal action follows a similar lawsuit by The New York Times against OpenAI four months earlier, concerning copyright issues with the ChatGPT chatbot launched in late 2022. OpenAI has dismissed the allegations as baseless and expressed its intent to foster a sustainable news environment.
OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, noted earlier that they had planned to compensate The New York Times, and were caught off guard by the lawsuit.
OpenAI has recently entered agreements with several media firms, such as Axel Springer and The Financial Times, permitting access to their articles to refine its AI technology. Similarly, Google has announced a deal with Reddit to use its content for AI model training.
The lawsuit involves newspapers like The New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune, and six others. They claim that OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot have been exploiting their copyrighted articles to train AI models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 without permission or compensation.
The complaint highlights instances where the AI outputs closely mimic substantial parts of their copyrighted content.
Additionally, the complaint addresses Microsoft's use of their content in the Bing search index to enhance Copilot's responses, often without linking back to the original articles, thereby bypassing potential ad revenue and subscription opportunities for the publishers.
In its defense, OpenAI has acknowledged these incidents as isolated lapses in its model training process and insists that improvements are being made continuously.