The artificial intelligence (AI) industry faces yet another copyright infringement lawsuit, as the New York Times (NYT), a renowned legacy media outlet, has taken legal action against OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
On December 27th, the NYT initiated the lawsuit, asserting that OpenAI unlawfully utilized its content to train its AI chatbots, thereby impeding the NYT’s ability to carry out its journalistic work.
The lawsuit draws from both the United States Constitution and the Copyright Act to protect the NYT’s original journalism. It also highlights Microsoft’s Bing AI, alleging that it generates verbatim excerpts from NYT content.
The lawsuit contends that OpenAI’s tools have undermined the NYT’s relationship with its readers, causing financial losses in subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue.
The NYT’s case mirrors concerns raised by other media companies.
In November, the News Media Alliance made similar claims, asserting that AI chatbots were illegally reproducing copyrighted news content and diverting revenue, data, and users from news publications.
Cecilia Ziniti, an intellectual property (IP) and AI lawyer, considers this lawsuit to be one of the most compelling cases of generative AI committing copyright infringement.
A central argument in the case is that the NYT’s website, “www.nytimes.com,” is among the most frequently used proprietary sources by AI, following only Wikipedia and a U.S. patent database.
The lawsuit exemplifies minor distinctions, consisting of just a few words, between original NYT content and the output from GPT-4.
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The lawsuit reveals that the NYT attempted to address its intellectual property concerns with Microsoft and OpenAI in April 2023 in pursuit of an amicable resolution, but these efforts proved unsuccessful.
Ziniti, a longtime subscriber to NYT and NYT Food archives, noted that if ChatGPT provided her with articles and full recipes for free, she might not continue to pay for NYT subscriptions.
She suggests that this case could be a pivotal moment for both AI and copyright law.
Within the OpenAI developer forum, a thread discussing the lawsuit elicited mixed reactions.
Some users hope that the NYT’s claims do not succeed, while others find the situation intriguing and believe it is worth pursuing for the Times.
This lawsuit follows the Author’s Guild’s class-action lawsuit against OpenAI in September, alleging the misuse of copyrighted material in training AI models.
OpenAI has committed to covering legal costs for business-tier ChatGPT users embroiled in copyright infringement disputes.
In the broader landscape, lawsuits related to copyright infringement in AI extend beyond OpenAI, with Universal Music Group suing Anthropic AI over the misuse of copyrighted musical compositions and artists pursuing legal action against Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Stability AI for the use of art in training image-generating AI models.
These cases underscore the complex legal challenges posed by AI’s interaction with copyrighted content.
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