‘The New York Times’ is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for using their texts without permission

The newspaper The New York Times filed a lawsuit this Wednesday against Microsoft and the artificial intelligence company OpenAI for using their texts without permission to train their AI models.

“By means of Microsoft BingChat (recently renamed ‘Second pilot’) And Open AI ChatGPT“The defendants seek to take advantage of The Times’ massive investments in journalism by using them to build substitute products without authorization or payment,” reads the lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan court.

The newspaper is not seeking specific financial compensation, but is seeking to hold the defendants accountable “billions of dollars” in damagesand that AI models use that “copyrighted” information The New York Times.

As part of the question they include examples from various texts produced by GPT-4 (one of OpenAI’s products) that are almost indistinguishable from any research published by the medium.

Additionally, they show that Microsoft’s Bing search engine can query entire paragraphs of news from the Timewhich requires a subscription to read much of the content.

Artificial intelligence ‘chatbots’ like ChatGPT use vast amounts of text data to predict the most likely word in response to a question, and therefore manage to recreate with astonishing accuracy human speech.

However, in many cases, all those texts used to train the model, such as books or press articles, are protected by ‘copyright’, and more and more authors and companies are demanding compensation for the use of their work.

At the beginning of this month, OpenAI, of which Microsoft is the main investor, reached an agreement with the media publishing company Axel Springer Politics, Business insider or Imageto use its contents in exchange for compensation.