The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft, the creators of ChatGPT and other AI platforms, over copyright infringement, claiming the companies are responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.”
The suit, filed Wednesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, does not include a specific monetary demand but does assert the above-mentioned claim that Microsoft and OpenAI are responsible for billions in damages, and also demands that any chatbot models and data that pulled copyrighted work from The Times be dismantled.
The Times alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft “likely used millions of Times-owned works in full in order to train the GPT models” and “repeatedly copied this mass of Times copyrighted content, without any
license or other compensation to The Times.”
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“As part of training the GPT models, Microsoft and OpenAI collaborated to develop a complex, bespoke supercomputing system to house and reproduce copies of the training dataset, including copies of The Times-owned content,” the filing states. “Millions of Times Works were copied and ingested—multiple times—for the purpose of ‘training’ Defendants’ GPT models.”
Representatives for Microsoft and OpenAI did not immediately respond to request for comment.
This lawsuit marks the first high-profile instance of a U.S. media company suing OpenAI and Microsoft over the copyright infringement regarding its written content.
“The protection of The Times’s intellectual property is critical to its continued ability to fund world-class journalism in the public interest,” the lawsuit states. “If The Times and its peers cannot control the use of their content, their ability to monetize that content will be harmed. With less revenue, news organizations will have fewer journalists able to dedicate time and resources to important, in-depth stories, which creates a risk that those stories will go untold. Less journalism will be produced, and the cost to society will be enormous.”
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