New York Times copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft
The New York Times Company has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of its content to train large language models. Commercial negotiations between the two parties were not successful.
From the New York Times complaint:
Defendants’ unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service. Defendants’ generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) tools rely on large-language models (“LLMs”) that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more….. Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as “Copilot”) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.
9 January update: OpenAI’s response:
While we disagree with the claims in The New York Times lawsuit, we view it as an opportunity to clarify our business, our intent, and how we build our technology. Our position can be summed up in these four points, which we flesh out below:
We collaborate with news organizations and are creating new opportunities
Training is fair use, but we provide an opt-out because it’s the right thing to do
“Regurgitation” is a rare bug that we are working to drive to zero
The New York Times is not telling the full story