© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: The OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken February 3, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo/File Photo
By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Wednesday, accusing them of using millions of articles from the newspaper without permission to help train chatbots to provide information to readers.
The Times said it is the first major U.S. media organization to sue OpenAI, creator of the popular ai platform ChatGPT, and Microsoft, an OpenAI investor and creator of the ai platform now known as Copilot, for copyright issues associated with your works.
Writers and others have also filed lawsuits to limit extraction (or automatic data collection) by artificial intelligence services of their online content without compensation.
The newspaper's complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court, accused OpenAI and Microsoft of attempting to “take advantage of the Times' enormous investment in its journalism” by using it to provide alternative means of delivering information to readers.
“There is nothing 'transformative' about using unpaid Times content to create products that replace the Times and steal its audience,” the Times said.
OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment. They have said that using copyrighted works to train ai products amounts to “fair use.”
Fair use is a legal doctrine that governs the unlicensed use of copyrighted material.
On its website, the U.S. Copyright Office says that “transformative” uses add “something new, with additional purpose or character” and “are more likely to be considered fair.”
The Times is not seeking a specific amount of damages, but the 172-year-old newspaper estimated damages in the “billions of dollars.”
It also wants companies to destroy chatbot models and the training suites that incorporate their material. Talks this year to avoid a lawsuit and allow “a mutually beneficial exchange of value” with the defendants were unsuccessful, the newspaper claimed.
VALUATION OF $80 BILLION
ai companies collect online information to train generative ai chatbots and have attracted billions of dollars in investments.
Investors have valued OpenAI at more than $80 billion.
While OpenAI's parent is a nonprofit, Microsoft has invested $13 billion in a for-profit subsidiary, so it would be a 49% stake.
Novelists including David Baldacci, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham and Scott Turow also sued OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court in Manhattan, alleging that ai systems could have co-opted tens of thousands of their books.
In July, comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors sued OpenAI and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:) in San Francisco for having “ingested” their works, including Silverman's 2010 book “The Bedwetter.” A judge dismissed most of that case in November.
The Times filed its lawsuit seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to revive a challenge to Google's (NASDAQ:) million-book digital library.
A federal appeals court found that the library giving readers access to excerpts of text constituted fair use of the authors' works.
“OpenAI is giving the copyright industry a second chance at control,” said Deven Desai, professor of law and business ethics at the Georgia Institute of technology.
“What matters is the results,” Desai said. “Part of the problem in assessing OpenAI's liability is that the company has altered its products as copyright issues arose. A court could say that its results at this point are sufficient to find liability.”
Chatbots have exacerbated the struggle among major media organizations to attract and retain readers, although the Times has fared better than most.
The Times ended September with 9.41 million digital-only subscribers, up from 8.59 million a year earlier, while print subscribers fell from 740,000 to 670,000.
Subscriptions generate more than two-thirds of the Times' revenue, while ads generate about 20% of its revenue.
'DISINFORMATION'
The Times lawsuit cited several cases in which chatbots from OpenAI and Microsoft gave users near-verbatim excerpts from their articles.
These included a 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning series about predatory lending in the New York City taxi industry, and Pete Wells' 2012 review of Guy Fieri's now-closed Guy's American Kitchen & Bar, which became a viral sensation.
The Times said such violations threaten high-quality journalism by reducing readers' perceived need to visit its website, reducing traffic and potentially reducing advertising and subscription revenue.
He also said the defendants' chatbots make it harder for readers to distinguish fact from fiction, even when their technology falsely attributes information to the newspaper.
The Times said ChatGPT once falsely attributed two office chair recommendations to its Wirecutter product review website.
“In ai parlance, this is called 'hallucination,'” the Times said. “In layman's terms, it's misinformation.”
Times general counsel Diane Brayton told staff in an internal memo that the newspaper recognized the potential of generative ai for journalism, but “use of our work to create GenAI tools must come with permission and an agreement that reflects the fair value of that work.” as established by law.”
The case is New York Times Co v Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:) et al, US District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 23-11195.
