The New York Times has filed a lawsuit in federal court against OpenAI and Microsoft, demanding an end to the use of its stories in training chatbots. The newspaper claims that these companies threaten its livelihood by stealing millions of dollars from its journalists’ work, as content from The New York Times is being copied verbatim and provided to those seeking answers from AI like ChatGPT. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Manhattan after negotiations between the newspaper and the companies broke down in April.
AI Threat to the News Industry
Media outlets are already suffering from a migration of readers to online platforms. While many publications – particularly The New York Times – have succeeded in the digital space, the rapid development of artificial intelligence threatens to radically change the publishing industry.
Impact of Chatbots on Web Traffic
Web traffic is an important part of the newspaper’s advertising revenue and contributes to increasing the number of subscribers to its website. However, chatbots are redirecting that traffic away from the newspaper and other copyright holders, making it unlikely that users will visit the original source for information.
Legal and Technical Implications of Unauthorized Use
AI companies collect publicly available information online, including articles published by news organizations, to train chatbots. Large language models are also trained on a massive corpus of written material created by humans, helping them build a strong command of language and grammar and answer questions accurately.
Future Challenges and Legal Claims
The New York Times faces a threat from these chatbots. However, fully resolving this issue is challenging, as there are many other language models doing the same work. The lawsuit includes examples of using OpenAI’s GPT-4 to copy large parts of New York Times articles, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into the taxi industry in New York City. The lawsuit also cited results from Bing Chat – now known as Copilot – that included verbatim excerpts from New York Times articles.
Demands of The New York Times and Reactions
The New York Times did not specify the damages it is seeking, but it stated that the lawsuit “seeks to hold them accountable for the billions of dollars in legal and actual damages they owe” for copying and using its work. The newspaper is also asking the court to order the tech companies to destroy AI models or datasets containing its work.
The News/Media Alliance, a trade association representing more than 2,200 media organizations, welcomed the action taken by The New York Times. Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the alliance, stated, “Quality journalism and artificial intelligence can complement each other if there is cooperation between them, but using journalism without permission or payment is illegal and certainly not fair use.”
In July, OpenAI and the Associated Press announced an agreement to license the AP News archive to the AI company. This month, OpenAI also signed a similar partnership with Axel Springer, a Berlin-based media company that owns Politico and Business Insider. Under the agreement, users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT will receive summaries of “specific global news content” from Axel Springer media brands. The two companies stated that answers to inquiries will include attribution to the original source.
The New York Times compared its action to the copyright lawsuit filed over two decades ago against Napster, when record companies sued the file-sharing service for its illegal use of their materials. The record companies won, and Napster disappeared soon after, but it left a significant mark on the industry. Industry-backed streaming now dominates the music industry.
Source:
https://apnews.com/article/nyt-new-york-times-openai-microsoft-6ea53a8ad3efa06ee4643b697df0ba57
Leave a Reply