Media outlets Raw Story, Alternet and The Intercept sued OpenAI for copyright infringement on Wednesday, joining a growing chorus rejecting the company's methods of scraping content from the Internet to train its ai-powered chatbot.
Online publications sued OpenAI in federal court in New York in two separate cases, saying ChatGPT's creator trained his chatbot using journalists' copyrighted works without properly crediting or citing them. The companies are demanding damages of at least $2,500 per infringement, in addition to asking OpenAI to remove all copyrighted articles from the training data sets.
The Intercept also sued Microsoft, an OpenAI partner that developed its own chatbot called Bing using the same copyrighted information, according to the lawsuit.
“It's time for news organizations to fight back against Big tech's continued attempts to monetize other people's work,” John Byrne, CEO and founder of Raw Story, which owns Alternet, said in a statement. “Big technologies have decimated journalism. It’s time for publishers to take a stand.”
OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in the past, OpenAI has saying that he wanted to work with publishers to ensure they could also benefit from ai and new revenue models. microsoft ai-legal-concerns/” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>saying in September that it would cover legal costs when customers' use of its ai products caused copyright concerns and reiterated its commitments to authors' protected works.
The Intercept also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuits follow The New York Times' own lawsuit in December against OpenAI and Microsoft on similar grounds. On Monday, OpenAI filed a motion with the court to dismiss key elements of the Times' lawsuit.
Generative ai has been making waves over the past year as new text and image generators have created increasingly realistic or human-like text, images and videos. But it has also raised major concerns regarding the use of copyrighted works to train ai algorithms, as well as their ability to recreate artistic performances.
The technology became a major issue for actors and writers in Hollywood union negotiations last year, and authors and others have sued ai companies over their practices.
The three publications that sued OpenAI on Wednesday are digital-only, raising the stakes, the outlets said in their lawsuits. They cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prevents the removal of information such as the author and title of protected works.
“Raw Story's copyrighted journalism is the result of significant efforts by the human journalists who report the news,” Raw Story editor Roxanne Cooper said in a statement. “Instead of licensing that work, OpenAI taught ChatGPT to ignore journalists' copyrights and hide the use of copyrighted material.”
