KUALA LUMPUR – The New York Times (NYT) has filed a suit against renowned artificial intelligence (AI)-based organisation OpenAI and its stakeholder Microsoft for taking advantage of its articles to train chatbots.
The suit, being the first of its kind, could set a chain reaction for other media companies worldwide to take on fast-emerging AI tech firms through legal wrangling in an effort to keep their businesses afloat.
According to the US-based New York Post (NYP), in its report, NYT filed the suit for “federal copyright infringement” at the Manhattan district court yesterday, claiming that both OpenAI and Microsoft took advantage by using “millions” of copyrighted articles to create artificial intelligence products that compete with and threaten the publication’s ability to provide that service.
“Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as ‘Copilot’) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment,” the suit stated.
In addition to seeking unspecified damages, the NYT, in its suit, also wants the court to order the “destruction” of all GPT and “large-language models” that were trained using its work, as it “seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages”.
The NYP report further stated that both OpenAI and Microsoft have claimed “fair use” in their usage of copyrighted material to train AI products.
In response to the suit, a spokesman for OpenAI reportedly said: “We respect the rights of content creators and owners and are committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models.
“Our ongoing conversations with the New York Times have been productive and moving forward constructively, so we are surprised and disappointed with this development.
“We’re hopeful that we will find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we are doing with many other publishers.”
Meanwhile, a spokesman for NYT said AI chatbots were “built with and continue to use independent journalism and content that is only available because we and our peers reported, edited, and fact-checked it at high cost and with considerable expertise”.
“Settled copyright law protects our journalism and content. If Microsoft and OpenAI want to use our work for commercial purposes, the law requires that they first obtain our permission.
“They have not done so,” the spokesman said in a statement to NYP.
Furthermore, in the suit, NYT’s legal team cited multiple examples in which ChatGPT regurgitated from its articles and those by Wirecutter, the outlet’s product review site, “verbatim”.
In one instance highlighted in the suit, ChatGPT delivered a line-by-line copy of the New York Times’ scathing 2012 review of Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen & Bar restaurant.
Another example claimed that after a ChatGPT user complained about the Times’ paywall preventing them from reading a 2012 article titled Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the AI tool provided verbatim text from the piece.
In the suit, NYT complained that despite the numerous instances of lifting NYT articles or excerpts from its articles through chatbots such as ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Browse with Bing AI tool, it failed to cite the links to the original articles.
It has been learned that chatbots are also prone to “hallucinations”, which cause misinformation to be issued, such as wrongly attributing articles, something that both OpenAI and rival Google have admitted their AI tools are doing.
“Times (NYT) journalism is the work of thousands of journalists, whose employment costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
“Defendants have effectively avoided spending the billions of dollars that The Times (NYT) invested in creating that work by taking it without permission or compensation,” it stated in its complaint.
OpenAI is a nonprofit company, while Microsoft has invested US$13 billion (RM59.97 billion) in its for-profit subsidiary.
An anticipated share sale for OpenAI is expected to boost the value of the company by more than US$80 billion (RM369.04 billion).
According to the NYT, the suit was filed following months of negotiations between the companies that failed to produce a deal.
The suit is among the first signs of backlash from media companies, which have expressed fear that the growing emergence of chatbots and similar AI tools pose a threat to the growth and profitability of the long-struggling journalism sector globally. – December 28, 2023