The artificial intelligence technology used by OpenAI and Microsoft to train ChatGPT and other services to provide people with information has been accused by the New York Times of copyright infringement. This technology is now in competition with the Times. The lawsuit claims that the companies illegally copied millions of Times articles.
The lawsuit is the most recent in a series that aim to restrict the use of purportedly extensive information scraping from the internet — without payment — to train so-called large language artificial intelligence models. Actors, authors, journalists, and other creative professionals who publish their works online worry that artificial intelligence (AI) would use their work as a basis and create rival chatbots and other information sources without paying them fairly.
However, the Times is the first of the big news organizations to file a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, the two most well-known AI companies.
The Times said that Microsoft and OpenAI’s “illegal use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service” in a complaint that was submitted on Wednesday. Although OpenAI and Microsoft “given Times content particular emphasis” in their “widespread copying,” the publication pointed out that they also used other sources in their attempt “to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.”
