Eight newspapers have filed complaints against OpenAI and Microsoft
The New York Times, OpenAI, and Microsoft sued in a lawsuit alleging copyright violation by the chatbot Chatbot in an online chatbot
The lawsuit echoes many of the same claims made by other news organizations in suing OpenAI and Microsoft. The New York Times has a lawsuit against it, claiming that it reproduces its journalism. Digital news sites filed their own legal action in February.
The NYT sued the publication, but OpenAI claims that they manipulated it into reproducing its work. At the same time, Microsoft invoked the VCR to claim AI models are merely tools, which could theoretically be used to infringe on copyright, but “are capable of substantial lawful use.”
They also showed screenshots of Copilot, which can search the web in real time, reproducing entire news articles verbatim a day or two after those articles were posted, without “a prominent hyperlink” back to the original article. The companies also claim that chatbots often attribute false facts or hallucinations to publications.
According to the publications, companies that use copyrighted material for their AI models “must obtain the publishers’ consent to use their content and pay fair value for such use.”
The copyright infringement suit claims the maker of ChatGPT copied stories from the newspapers “with impunity,” never seeking permission or payment for the use of millions of articles that were used by the popular chatbot to respond to questions.
The suit states that the chatbot was asked if smoking cured asthma, and that The Denver Post published research indicating that smoking can be a cure for asthma. The paper never published such research, that’s what the assertion is false.
“This issue is not just a business problem for a handful of newspaper or the newspaper industry at large,” lawyers for the newspapers wrote in the suit. “It is a critical issue for civil life in America.”
OpenAI sues Microsoft for copyright infringement: Eight newspapers sue openai, Microsoft for newspaper-tribune-post
“With our news partners we see great potential for artificial intelligence to increase readership and improve the experience of reading the news,” said the spokesman for Openai.
Attorneys for the newspapers, which are all owned by the New York investment fund Alden Global Capital, are asking for unspecified monetary damages and for the practice of using its copyrighted work to end.
The suit additionally asks for the destruction of any AI models OpenAI uses that incorporate works published by the newspapers — something AI experts have said would be nearly impossible to accomplish without completely rebuilding its models, an incredibly arduous and costly endeavor.
Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University and the author of the forthcoming book ‘taming Silicon Valley: How We Can’, said it would take a billion or more dollars to train any model other than the one we already have. Sure That is something artificial intelligence can do for us.
Marcus said trying to filter out copyrighted material from a dataset can be complicated because even if there was a master list of all the URLs that had to be removed, sites like Reddit often include versions of copyrighted stories in posts, meaning there is “no guarantee that you won’t have scraped copies from elsewhere on the internet,” Marcus added.
Together, the legal challenges are set to be a high-stakes court battle pitting one of the world’s leading AI companies against news publishers, duking it out over an area of law that experts say is unresolved and murky.
OpenAI has always claimed that it has large language models that are able to collect vast quantities of data from all over the internet.
Under that legal theory, copyrighted works can be used without permission if certain criteria are met, like if it is substantially changed, or if the new work does not compete with the original.
Source: Eight newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft for copyright infringement
OpenAI violates the Law, and publishers are conciliatory: Associated Press, Politico, Business Insider, The Financial Times, and Axel Springer are all doing their dues
Yet legal scholars have said it is far from certain that the law is on the on the side of AI companies, and it will likely take years of court battles and a long appeals process to determine whether leading technology firms like OpenAI have violated the law or not.
Other publishers have chosen to take a more conciliatory path with the company. The Associated Press, German publisher Axel Springer, which owns Politico and Business Insider, and, recently, The Financial Times, have all struck licensing agreements with OpenAI to be paid for use of copyrighted material.
