A coalition of major news publishers has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing the tech giants of illegally using copyrighted articles without permission or compensation to train generative AI models.
As first reported by The Verge, a group of eight publications owned by Alden Global Capital (AGC), including the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, and Orlando Sentinel, claim that the companies plagiarized “millions” of their articles without permission or compensation “to further the commercialization of generative artificial intelligence products like ChatGPT and Copilot.”
The lawsuit is the latest legal action brought against Microsoft and OpenAI for misusing copyrighted content in building the large-scale language models (LLMs) that underpin AI technologies such as ChatGPT. In its complaint, AGC publications allege that the companies' chatbots are able to reproduce articles verbatim shortly after publication without providing a conspicuous link to the original source.
“This litigation is not a battle between new technology and old technology, between a thriving industry and an industry in transition, and certainly not a battle to resolve the mountain of social, political, moral and economic questions that GenAI raises,” the lawsuit reads.
“This lawsuit is about Microsoft and OpenAI not having the right to build a new trillion-dollar company using copyrighted newspaper content without paying for that content.”
The plaintiffs also accuse the AI model of “hallucinating” and claim the publication's reporting is inaccurate. They note that OpenAI has previously admitted that it is “impossible” to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted material.
The allegations are the same as those made in a separate lawsuit filed by The New York Times last year, in which the Times alleged that Microsoft and OpenAI used nearly a century's worth of copyrighted content without a license agreement and had its AI mimic its expressive style.
In trying to dismiss key parts of the New York Times lawsuit, Microsoft suggested that generative AI could threaten independent journalism and accused the paper of “apocalyptic futurism.”
The AGC publication alleges that OpenAI, now worth $90 billion since becoming a for-profit company, and Microsoft, whose market capitalization has increased by hundreds of billions of dollars thanks to ChatGPT and Copilot, are profiting from the unauthorized use of copyrighted material.
The news publishers are seeking unspecified damages and an order for Microsoft and OpenAI to destroy all GPT and LLM models that utilized their copyrighted content.
Earlier this week, OpenAI entered into a licensing partnership with the Financial Times, legally integrating the paper’s journalism. But the AGC’s latest lawsuit highlights growing tensions between tech companies developing generative AI and content creators who worry that their work will be used unrestrictedly to train lucrative AI systems.
(Photo: Wesley Tingey)
reference: OpenAI faces complaints about fictitious outputs
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