By Alexandra Bruell | Wall Street Journal
The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement, touching off a legal fight over generative-AI technologies with far-reaching implications for the future of the news publishing business.
In a complaint filed Wednesday, the Times said the technology companies exploited its content without permission to create their AI products, including OpenAI’s humanlike chatbot ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot. The tools were trained on millions of pieces of Times content, the suit said, and draw on that material to serve up answers to users’ prompts.
The suit opens a new front in a yearslong battle between tech and media companies over the economics of the internet, pitting one of the news industry’s biggest players against pioneers of a new wave of artificial-intelligence technologies. It comes after months of commercial negotiations between the companies failed to produce a deal, according to the Times.
In its complaint, the Times said it believes it is among the largest sources of proprietary information for OpenAI and Microsoft’s AI products. Their AI tools divert traffic that would otherwise go to the Times’ web properties, depriving the company of advertising, licensing and subscription revenue, the suit said.
“Generative AI products, like ChatGPT and Midjourney, have changed the way users interact with information. Generative AIs are trained on billions of works pulled from the internet, some in the public domain and some still protected by copyright. These sophisticated algorithms appear to produce new works from a user prompts, but are actually reproducing patterns and relationships of expressive elements—like words, colors, and shapes—from the AI’s training data. Generative AI does not understand the concepts in an article or what a picture represents, it only understands the expressive elements of the work, which are generally within the domain of copyright protection. AI companies rely on a broad interpretation of the fair use doctrine, but fair-use is context dependent and has never been applied to sanction unlimited uses as enabled by modern AI. There is no question that generative-AI products are already changing the markets for creative works and I think we’re likely to see a Napster-like decision in the next few years that will shake up the market for generative-AI products.”
– Paul Coble, AI & Web3 Attorney and Chair of the Intellectual Property Department at Rose Law Group
