The New York Times says ChatGPT-owner OpenAI and Microsoft should be held responsible for ‘millions of dollars’ in damages for what it claims are copyright infringements in the course of training the system.
According to the BBC, the lawsuit claims that ‘millions’ of articles published by the New York Times were used without its permission to make ChatGPT smarter, and claims the tool is now competing with the newspaper as a trustworthy information source.
It alleges that when asked about current events, ChatGPT will sometimes generate ‘verbatim excerpts’ from New York Times articles, which cannot be accessed without paying for a subscription.
ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) ‘learn’ by analysing a massive amount of data, often sourced online.
According to the lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan court on Wednesday, the New York Times approached Microsoft and OpenAI in April, without success, to seek ‘an amicable resolution’ over the copyright issues.
The BBC reports that OpenAI is facing multiple lawsuits filed in 2023.
Among these is another copyright infringement case brought by a group of US authors, including Game of Thrones novelist George RR Martin and John Grisham.
This followed legal action brought by comedian Sarah Silverman in July, as well as an open letter signed by authors Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman that same month, calling for AI companies to compensate them for using their work.
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