Eight newspaper publishers sue Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement

Eight American newspaper publishers filed a lawsuit Microsoft And OpenAI sued in New York federal court on Thursday claiming technology companies reuse its articles without permission in generative artificial intelligence products and misrepresent them.

The legal challenge comes four months after The New York Times OpenAI sued Over copyright infringement in the ChatGPTT chatbot, which the startup released in late 2022. OpenAI said in a January blog post The case is unfounded, saying it wants to support “a healthy news ecosystem”. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Said In January the startup wanted to pay The New York Times and was surprised to learn about the lawsuit.

In recent months, OpenAI has signed agreements with some media companies axel springer And The Financial TimesEnables Microsoft-backed startups to draw on publishers’ content to improve AI models. Googlewhich has its own general-purpose chatbot to answer user queries, Said In February an agreement was reached with reddit Which includes the right to train AI models on the platform’s content.

A group of eight newspaper publishers sued ChatGPT and Microsoft’s CoPilot assistant – which is available in the Windows operating system, the Bing search engine and other products produced by the software maker – for “stealing millions of copyrighted articles from publishers without permission and payment.” Raises the issue. ” According to Complaint,

Microsoft and OpenAI representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The lawsuit includes newspaper publishers who operate The New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinel, The Sun-Sentinel of Florida, The Mercury News of California, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register in California and The Pioneer Press of Minnesota. Are. ,

He said OpenAI has prepared data sets containing text from its newspapers to train its GPT-2 and GPT-3 large language models, which can spit out text in response to a few words of human input.

“The existing GPT-4 LLM will produce near-verbatim copies of significant portions of publishers’ works when asked to do so,” the complaint states. It reportedly shows several examples of ChatGPIT and Copilot.

Publishers said Microsoft copies information from their newspapers for the Bing search index, which helps inform answers in Copilot. But such output does not always provide links to newspaper websites, where they can view advertisements accompanying articles or pay for a subscription.

In the case of New York Times, the issue of retrieving information from its articles by OpenAI model also arose. In its blog post, OpenAI described such behavior as “a rare failure of the learning process on which we are continuing to make progress.”

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