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Right now, the New York Times is in the middle of a heated lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement. The lawsuit specifically points to the company’s using copyrighted articles to train their AI models. Well, more publications are suing Microsoft and OpenAI for the same reason.
Right now, we’re still trying to navigate the legality of companies using copyrighted information to train AI models. Should it be illegal? That’s a question that we won’t have the answer to for quite some time. Until then, we should all expect to see more lawsuits like these pop up as time goes on.
More companies are suing Microsoft and OpenAI over AI
The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Sun-Sentinel, Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register, and Pioneer Press, are all collectively suing Microsoft and OpenAI. This isn’t a random assortment of papers, as they are all owned by the same hedge fund Alden Global Capital. All the companies are pursuing it because of the same reason as well.
They all claim that Microsoft and OpenAI are using copyrighted material. All these companies have copyrighted and paywalled articles. However, that didn’t stop their articles from being used to train the AI models.
Also, ChatGPT could be used to regurgitate entire sections of the copyrighted works. This is identical to the New York Times’ lawsuit, The lawsuit, claims that they can get ChatGPT to reproduce entire articles verbatim within a few days of their posting. Since people can use ChatGPT and other chatbots powered by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 for free, this gives people free access to copyrighted material.
To make things worse, the companies also claim that chatbots can hallucinate certain details and attribute those hallucinated details to publications. This negatively affects The credibility of these news websites.
It’s also about the money
“This lawsuit is about how Microsoft and OpenAI are not entitled to use copyrighted newspaper content to build their new trillion-dollar enterprises without paying for that content,” says the complaint. This is something that makes sense, as OpenAI demonstrates the ability to leap paywalls and access the content without compensating the publications. This is, obviously, a huge issue.
So, this is another lawsuit that will probably go on for a while. It should come as no surprise that major companies like these are going through major copyright lawsuits over their AI technology. Currently, a group of artists and a photographer are suing Google for using their copyrighted works to train their Imagen image model.