A group of U.S. newspapers initiated legal action against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging that the technology companies are using their articles without permission in generative artificial intelligence products and attributing inaccurate information to them.
The lawsuit filed by eight newspapers, including the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune, is focused on the usage of ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot assistant, which are integrated into various Microsoft products such as the Windows operating system and the Bing search engine.
The other six newspapers are The Orlando Sentinel, the Sun Sentinel in Florida, The Mercury News in California, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register in California, and the Pioneer Press of Minnesota.
All eight are owned by investment firm Alden Global Capital's MediaNews Group.
The complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Tuesday said ChatGPT and Copilot unlawfully appropriated millions of copyrighted articles from the publishers without obtaining permission or providing compensation.
According to the lawsuit, OpenAI has drawn on data sets containing text from their newspapers to train its GPT-2 and GPT-3 large language models. These models can generate text in response to minimal human input.
The publishers also claim that Microsoft incorporates information from their newspapers into the Bing search index, which in turn influences the responses provided by Copilot. However, these responses often lack links to newspaper websites, where readers can access advertisements alongside articles or subscribe to the publications.
The lawsuit comes four months after The New York Times filed a similar challenge against OpenAI for copyright infringement related to the ChatGPT chatbot.
In recent months, OpenAI has entered into agreements with several media companies, such as Axel Springer and the Financial Times, allowing the startup to use the publishers' content to enhance its AI models.
Meanwhile, Google, which operates its own general-purpose chatbot for responding to user queries, announced in February that it had struck a deal with Reddit, granting it the right to train AI models using content from the platform.
Reacting to the reports of the lawsuit, an OpenAI spokesperson acknowledged the concerns raised by Alden Global Capital and said the company is committed to supporting news organizations.
The spokesperson highlighted OpenAI's ongoing efforts to engage in constructive partnerships and discussions with various news organizations globally to address concerns and explore opportunities. The spokesperson also cited the potential of AI tools like ChatGPT to strengthen publishers' connections with readers and improve the news consumption experience.
