Just yesterday, the New York Times court sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement! demanding the destruction of ChatGPT and any other large language models and training sets that use the work of the New York Times without paying for it.
The lawsuit accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of copyrighted data from The New York Times to train AI models like ChatGPT without permission. What's more, the lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT and Bing Chat often copy long, verbatim copies of New York Times articles. This has allowed ChatGPT users to bypass The New York Times' paywall, with the lawsuit alleging that generative AI is now a competitor to newspapers as a reliable source of information.
The New York Times' lawsuit seeks "billions of dollars in statutory damages and actual damages" from Microsoft and OpenAI, and seeks to destroy "all GPT or other large language models and training sets that contain Times Works," according to court filings.
The New York Times held the two defendant companies legally liable for "illegally copying and using valuable works unique to The New York Times." The New York Times also said that the two companies, which have invested heavily in journalism, are trying to use ChatGPT and Copilot to hitchhike and use the New York Times' data to create alternative products for the newspaper without permission or payment.
OpenAI and Microsoft have yet to respond to this.
Courts must ultimately decide whether training AI on the open internet is protected by U.S. fair use law. The fair use doctrine allows for restrictions on the use of copyrighted works under certain circumstances, such as short snippets of articles in Google search results. Attorneys representing the New York Times say ChatGPT and Bing Chat's use of copyrighted material is more serious than in search results. This is because search engines provide prominent hyperlinks to publishers' articles, while Microsoft and OpenAI's chatbots hide the source of information.
The outcome of this lawsuit, as well as other similar lawsuits in San Francisco, could have a significant impact on the future of generative AI. Early innovators of AI, such as Google, Adobe, and Microsoft, would take it to court to protect users if they found themselves caught in a copyright lawsuit, but the companies themselves were accused of copyright infringement.
The New York Times lawsuit will help define OpenAI and Microsoft's role in the AI revolution. If The New York Times wins, it will be a big opportunity for other big tech giants like Apple and Google to get ahead.
