By Emmanuel Nduka
The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against Microsoft and OpenAI, the company behind popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, accusing them of infringing copyright and abusing the newspaper’s intellectual property.
In its complaint, the New York Times said it believes it is among the largest sources of proprietary information for OpenAI and Microsoft’s AI products.
The media platform is alleging that the companies’ powerful AI models used millions of articles for training without permission.
Through their AI chatbots, the companies “seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment,” the lawsuit said.
In a court filing, the newspaper said it seeks to hold Microsoft and OpenAI to account for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” it believes it is owed for “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”
Microsoft and OpenAI are accused by the paper of creating a business model based on “mass copyright infringement,” stating their AI systems “exploit and, in many cases, retain large portions of the copyrightable expression contained in those works.”
