A group of eight US newspapers is suing ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the technology companies have been “purloining millions” of copyrighted news articles without permission or payment to train their artificial intelligence chatbots.
The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post and other papers filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in a New York federal court.
“We’ve spent billions of dollars gathering information and reporting news at our publications, and we can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense,” said a written statement from Frank Pine, executive editor for the MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing.
The other newspapers that are part of the lawsuit are MediaNews Group’s Mercury News, Orange County Register and St Paul Pioneer-Press, and Tribune Publishing’s Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel.
All of the newspapers are owned by Alden Global Capital.
Microsoft declined to comment on Tuesday. OpenAI said in a statement that it takes care to support news organisations.
“While we were not previously aware of Alden Global Capital’s concerns, we are actively engaged in constructive partnerships and conversations with many news organisations around the world to explore opportunities, discuss any concerns, and provide solutions,” it said.
The lawsuit is the latest against OpenAI and Microsoft to land at Manhattan’s federal court, where the companies are already battling a series of other copyright lawsuits from the New York Times, other media outlets and bestselling authors such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George RR Martin.
The companies also face another set of lawsuits in San Francisco’s federal court.
Tech companies have argued that taking troves of publicly accessible internet content to train their AI systems is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of American copyright law. In some cases, they have averted potential legal challenges by paying organisations for that content.
The Associated Press last year agreed to a partnership with OpenAI in which the technology company would pay an undisclosed fee to license AP’s archive of news stories.
OpenAI has also made licensing deals with other media companies including news publishing giants Axel Springer in Germany and Prisa Media in Spain, France’s Le Monde newspaper and, most recently, the London-based Financial Times.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here