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.
According to the media, millions of its articles have been used to fine-tune chatbots against which they are now forced to compete in the information sector.
“Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently renamed Copilot) and Open AI’s ChatGPT, the defendants seek to take advantage of The Times’ enormous investment in its journalism, using it to build substitute products without permission or payment,” the statement reads. lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan court.
The newspaper is not seeking specific financial compensation, but is seeking to hold the defendants liable for “billions of dollars” in damages, and to destroy AI models that use information copyrighted by The New York Times.
As part of the lawsuit, examples of various texts produced by GPT-4 (one of OpenAI’s products) are included that are almost indistinguishable from some research published by the medium.
Additionally, they show that Microsoft’s Bing search engine can be asked to copy entire paragraphs of news from the Times, which requires a subscription to read much of its content.
Artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT use huge amounts of text data to predict the most likely word in response to a question, recreating human speech with astonishing accuracy.
However, in many cases, all those texts that are used to train the model, such as books or press articles, are protected by copyright, and more and more authors and companies demand to be compensated for the use of their work.
At the beginning of the month, OpenAI, whose main investor is Microsoft, reached an agreement with the company Axel Springer, which publishes the media Politico, Business Insider or Bild, to use its content in exchange for a fee.
