The New York Times sued the "Open Artificial Intelligence Research Center" (openai) and Microsoft on the 27th, accusing the two companies of using millions of articles to train artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT without authorization.
According to the Associated Press, The New York Times began negotiations with OpenAI and Microsoft on copyright in April, but failed to reach a deal. On the 27th of this month, the New York Times filed a lawsuit in the federal district court in Manhattan, New York.
The indictment alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft "attempted to ride the New York Times' huge investment in journalism by using The Times' content to create alternative products without permission or payment."
The New York Times said that in some cases, the defendant companies copied the content published in the New York Times verbatim and provided it to users who sought answers from the AI chatbot. The use of the New York Times' work in this way is illegal, mainly because these new products create potential competitors for news publishers.
If The New York Times and other news organizations fail to produce and protect independent news stories, there will be a vacuum in society that computers and artificial intelligence cannot fill," the indictment said. ”
The company is seeking compensation and demanding that the two defendant companies stop using their content to train AI models and destroy the data they have collected.
While the exact amount of the claim was not mentioned, the New York Times said the infringement could result in "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages," according to AFP.
OpenAI said it was "surprised and disappointed" to file a lawsuit against the New York Times, given that it was engaged in "constructive negotiations" with the New York Times on copyright issues. An OpenAI spokesperson said: "We hope to find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we have done with many other publishers. ”
Microsoft did not comment for this for this matter.
Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI and can leverage OpenAI's AI technology. The Associated Press reported that Microsoft has invested at least $13 billion in OpenAI since the two began working together in 2019.
AI companies are facing a wave of copyright lawsuits. Last year, a group of best-selling authors, including George R.R. Martin, the original author of "Game of Thrones", filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of copyright infringement for developing ChatGPT. France's Globo group and other publishers sued the American company Anthropic this year, accusing it of using copyrighted lyrics to train artificial intelligence systems and generate answers to user queries. **Enterprise Getty Images*** identified the UK-based "stable" AI company as using the profits of the **company and its partners to produce visual AI that generates images.
At the same time, hundreds of news publishers use programming to prevent OpenAI, Google, and others from viewing theirs for training data.
*: Xinhua News Agency, Guangzhou**, New Flower City Editor, Zhang Yingwu.