Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, during a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 18, 2024.
Stefan Wermuth | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Eight US newspaper publishers filed suit against Microsoft and OpenAI in a New York federal court on Tuesday, alleging that the tech companies are reusing their articles without permission in AI-powered products and falsely attributing inaccurate information to them.
The group of eight newspaper publishers is taking issue with ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot assistant — available on the Windows operating system, the Bing search engine and other products the software maker makes. ChatGPT and Copilot have “hunted down millions of copyrighted articles from publishers without permission and without payment,” according to the complaintwhich had been filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The newspaper publishers in the lawsuit are the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, 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 in Minnesota.
The newspaper publishers said in the lawsuit that OpenAI has relied on datasets containing text from their newspapers to train the GPT-2 and GPT-3 large language models, which can spit out text in response to a few words of human input .
“The current GPT-4 LLM will produce near-verbatim copies of significant portions of publishers’ works when requested to do so,” the complaint said, pointing to several examples of ChatGPT and Copilot allegedly doing so.
Publishers said Microsoft copies information from their newspapers for the Bing search index, which helps inform responses on Copilot. However, this result does not always provide links to newspaper websites, where they can see ads alongside articles or pay for subscriptions.
Representatives for Microsoft and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CNBC.
The legal challenge comes four months after the New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement on its ChatGPT chatbot that the startup released in late 2022. OpenAI told January blog post that the case is baseless, adding that he wants to support “a healthy news ecosystem.” That same month, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said the startup wanted to pay The New York Times and was surprised to learn of the lawsuit.
In recent months, OpenAI has signed deals with a handful of media companies, including Axel Springer and Financial Timesenabling the Microsoft-backed startup to draw on publishers’ content to improve its AI models.
Googlewhich has its own general-purpose chatbot to answer user queries, he said in February with which he had reached an agreement Reddit which includes the right to train AI models on the content of the platform.
The New York Times case also raised the issue of OpenAI models retrieving information from their articles. In its blog post, OpenAI called such behavior “a rare failure of the learning process in which we are constantly making progress.”
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the correct filing date of the lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI.
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