The news industry just gained a powerful ally in its quest to tackle OpenAI.
The Center for Investigative Reporting, the nation’s oldest nonprofit newsroom, sued OpenAI and head of support Microsoft in federal court Thursday for alleged copyright infringement, following similar lawsuits from publications including The New York TimesChicago Tribune and New York Daily News.
CIR alleged in the lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, that OpenAI “copied, used, abridged and presented CIR’s valuable content without CIR’s permission or authorization and without any compensation to CIR.”
Since its public release in late 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot crawls the web to provide answers to user queries, often relying on copy pulled directly from news stories.
“When they filled their training sets with journalistic works, the defendants had a choice: to respect the journalistic works or not,” the plaintiffs wrote in the suit. “The defendants chose the latter.”
In a press release Thursday, Monika Bauerlein, the nonprofit’s executive director, accused the defendants of “free-rider behavior.”
“OpenAI and Microsoft started collecting our stories to make their product more powerful, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organizations that license our stuff,” Bauerlein said.
CIR, which is home to Mother Jones and Reveal audio programming, also alleged in the lawsuit that OpenAI “trained ChatGPT not to recognize or respect copyright. And they did all of this without permission.”
The group said it is seeking “actual damages and profits of the defendants or statutory damages of at least $750 per infringed work and $2,500 per DMCA violation,” referring to the Digital Copyright Act.
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
“We work in partnership with the news industry and partner with global news publishers to feature their content in our products like ChatGPT, including summaries, excerpts and attribution, to drive traffic to original articles,” an OpenAI spokesperson told CNBC . “One element of the partnerships is the ability to leverage publisher content using various machine learning and training techniques to help us optimize the display of that content and make it more useful to users.”
As the news industry broadly struggles to maintain sufficient ad and subscription revenue to pay for its costly newsgathering operations, many publications are aggressively trying to protect their businesses as AI-generated content becomes more widespread.
In December, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging copyright violations related to their journalistic content appearing in ChatGPT training data. The Times said it is seeking to hold Microsoft and OpenAI accountable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of the Times’ unique and valuable works,” according to a filing in U.S. District Court for the South. New York Region. OpenAI disagreed with the Times’ characterization of the facts.
The Chicago Tribune, along with seven other papers, followed with a similar suit in April.
Outside the news, a group of prominent US authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George RR Martin and Jodi Picoult, sued OpenAI last year, alleging copyright infringement when using their work to train ChatGPT.
But not all news organizations are preparing for a battle, and some are joining forces with OpenAI. Earlier Thursday, OpenAI and Time magazine announced a “multi-year content agreement” that will allow OpenAI to access current and archived articles from more than 100 years of Time’s history.
OpenAI will be able to display Time content in ChatGPT’s chatbot in response to user questions, according to Press releaseand to use Time’s content “to improve its products” or, more likely, to train its AI models.
OpenAI announced a similar partnership in May with News Corp., allowing OpenAI to access current and archived articles from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, New York Post and other publications. Reddit also announced in May that it would partner with OpenAI, allowing the company to train its AI models on Reddit content.
I’M WATCHING: Microsoft gets backfoot AI after Apple-OpenAI deal
