OpenAI filed a motion in federal court Monday seeking to dismiss some key elements of a lawsuit filed by The New York Times Company.
The times defendant OpenAI and its partner Microsoft on December 27, accusing them of infringing its copyright by using millions of its articles to train artificial intelligence technologies such as the online chatbot ChatGPT. Chatbots now compete with the media as a reliable source of information, according to the lawsuit.
In the motion filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the defendants argue that ChatGPT “is in no way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times.”
“In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product for that purpose,” the document says. “Neither do they. Normally, ChatGPT cannot be used to publish Times articles at will.”
OpenAI declined to comment and Times Company did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The motion asked the court to dismiss four claims in the Times' complaint to narrow the focus of the lawsuit. OpenAI's lawyers argued that The Times should not be allowed to sue over acts of reproduction that occurred more than three years ago and that the newspaper's claim that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an amendment to the copyright law The US copyright law passed in 1998 after the rise of the Internet was not legally sound.
The Times was the first major American media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Novelists, computer programmers and other groups have also filed copyright lawsuits against the startup and other companies that create generative artificial intelligence, technologies that generate text, images and other media from short messages.
Like other ai companies, OpenAI built its technology by feeding it huge amounts of digital data, some of which is likely copyrighted. artificial intelligence companies have claimed that they can legally use such material to train their systems without paying for it because it is public and they do not reproduce the material in its entirety.
In its lawsuit, The Times included examples of OpenAI technology by reproducing excerpts from its articles almost verbatim. In the motion to dismiss, OpenAI's lawyers accused the Times of paying someone to hack its chatbot. “It took them tens of thousands of attempts to generate highly anomalous results,” the motion said.
“They were only able to do so by attacking and exploiting a bug (which OpenAI has committed to fix) through the use of deceptive messages that blatantly violate OpenAI's terms of use,” the document says.
The filing also argued that it was legal to use copyrighted material on its systems, citing legal precedents that allow the use of copyrighted content “in the creation of new, different and innovative products.”
“OpenAI and the other defendants in these lawsuits will ultimately prevail because no one, not even The New York Times, can monopolize the facts or the rules of language,” the complaint said.
