Eight newspapers sue Microsoft, OpenAI over the new artificial intelligence lawsuit
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This picture taken on Jan. 23, 2023, in Toulouse, southwestern France, shows screens displaying the logos of OpenAI and ChatGPT. — ChatGPT is a conversational artificial intelligence software application developed by OpenAI.
Eight newspapers sued Microsoft and OpenAI this past week, claiming the technology giants illegally harvested millions of copyrighted articles to create their cutting-edge “generative” artificial intelligence products including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.
Lawsuit Allegations
While the newspapers’ publishers have spent billions of dollars to send “real people to real places to report on real events in the real world,” the two tech firms are “purloining” the papers’ reporting without compensation “to create products that provide news and information plagiarized and stolen,” according to the lawsuit in federal court.
“We can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense,” said Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, which own seven of the newspapers.
Industry Impact
The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked a massive surge in generative AI investment by companies large and small, building and selling products that could answer questions, write essays, produce photo, video and audio simulations, create computer code, and make art and music.
Legal Disputes
Outputs from Microsoft and OpenAI products, the newspapers’ lawsuit claimed, reproduced portions of the newspapers’ articles verbatim. Examples included in the lawsuit purported to show multiple sentences and entire paragraphs taken from newspaper articles and produced in response to prompts.
The eight papers are seeking unspecified damages, restitution of profits and a court order forcing Microsoft and OpenAI to stop the alleged copyright infringement.
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