TL;DR:
- The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against Open AI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.
- The lawsuit alleges that Open AI used The Times’ content to develop AI chatbots without permission or compensation.
- This marks the first major media organization to take legal action against an AI platform for copyright violations.
- Authors Guild members, including John Grisham and Jodi Picoult, have also filed a class action lawsuit against Open AI.
- Another lawsuit involves writers Michael Chabon and David Henry Hwang suing Meta for using their works to train its AI platform.
- The legal disputes center around the use of copyrighted content to train AI models and its potential impact on the market.
Main AI News:
In a groundbreaking legal development, The New York Times has initiated a lawsuit against Open AI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement. The newspaper contends that the platform has been appropriating its content to fuel automated chatbots, constituting an “unlawful copying and utilization of The Times’s exceptionally valuable works.”
The Times asserts that the defendants are attempting to benefit from the substantial investments made by the newspaper in its journalism without obtaining proper authorization or providing compensation. This lawsuit marks the first instance of a major media organization taking legal action against an AI platform, even though there are several pending cases involving intellectual property owners such as Sarah Silverman, John Grisham, and Getty Images.
The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York (you can read it here), demands that Open AI and its supporter, Microsoft, be held accountable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.” Furthermore, it seeks the destruction of chatbot and training models that employ copyrighted material sourced from The New York Times.
The lawsuit emphasizes that The Times’s work is made possible through the efforts of a substantial and costly organization that provides legal, security, and operational support, in addition to a team of editors committed to upholding the highest standards of accuracy and fairness. The unlawful use of The Times’s work by the defendants to create competing artificial intelligence products poses a direct threat to The Times’s ability to continue providing its services.
The suit also highlights the fact that AI tools relying on large-language models, commonly referred to as LLMs, were developed by copying and utilizing millions of copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more from The Times. While the defendants engaged in widespread copying from numerous sources, they placed particular emphasis on The Times’s content when constructing their LLMs.
Generative AI, a burgeoning field prominently championed by Microsoft’s Open AI, trains chatbots using extensive datasets. The lawsuit alleges that the platform has employed “The Times’s content without compensation to create products that serve as substitutes for The Times, diverting audiences away from it.”
In a related development, The Authors Guild, along with notable fiction writers such as John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, Michael Connelly, and Jodi Picoult, have collectively filed a class action lawsuit against Open AI, asserting that the technology infringes upon their literary works.
Another group of writers, including Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon and Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, has also initiated a class action lawsuit against Meta in federal court. Their claim revolves around Meta’s use of their works to train its LLaMA AI platform, accusing the company of “copying and ingesting” their literary creations.
Central to this case is the training data for AI software programs designed to produce convincingly natural text responses to user prompts. These programs are trained by copying vast amounts of text and extracting expressive information from it, referred to as the training dataset. The plaintiffs assert that they hold copyrights for their books and written works and never consented to their use as training materials for LLaMA, the AI platform owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta.
Notably, in a separate legal action taken in July, Sarah Silverman and two other authors sued both Open AI and Meta for copyright infringement.
Conclusion:
The lawsuits filed by The New York Times and various authors against Open AI, Microsoft, and Meta highlight the growing concern over copyright infringement in the AI industry. These legal battles could set important precedents for intellectual property rights in the evolving AI market, potentially leading to more stringent regulations and licensing agreements to protect content creators. Businesses operating in the AI sector should closely monitor these developments and ensure compliance with copyright laws to avoid legal challenges.
