Eight U.S. newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court in Up-to-date York on Tuesday for violating their copyrights for training the technology behind the ChatGPT and Copilot chatbots.
The newspapers, which include The Up-to-date York Daily News and The Chicago Tribune, are owned by Alden Global Capital, a Florida-based investment firm that created the second-largest U.S. newspaper group after USA Today owner Gannett when it bought the Tribune publishing chain in 2021 .
“This lawsuit arose from the theft of millions of copyrighted articles from publishers without permission and without payment in order to fuel the commercialization of their generative artificial intelligence products, including (Microsoft’s) ChatGPT and Copilot,” according to the filing.
“As this lawsuit will demonstrate, defendants must both obtain permission from publishers to utilize their content and pay fair value for such utilize,” the lawsuit reads.
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OpenAI and its backer Microsoft have also been accused of offering verbatim excerpts from full articles, as well as attributing publications to misleading or incorrect reports in some requests.
Other newspapers involved in the case include The Orlando Sentinel, The Sun Sentinel of Florida, The San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register and The St. Paul Pioneer Press.
In a statement, OpenAI did not specifically address the allegations but said “we place great importance on our products and design process to support news organizations.”
OpenAI pointed to “constructive partnerships and conversations with a number of news organizations around the world to explore opportunities, discuss any concerns and provide solutions.”
This concerned news outlets that, instead of going to court, started cooperation with a Microsoft-backed start-up.
These include the Associated Press, the Financial Times, Germany’s Axel Springer, the French daily Le Monde and the Spanish conglomerate Prisa Media.
Tuesday’s lawsuit closely resembles a case filed by The Up-to-date York Times in December, in which OpenAI is also accused of stealing content to train its powerful artificial intelligence.
In this case, OpenAI strongly rejected the issue, arguing that using publicly available data, including news articles, for general training purposes is fair utilize.
OpenAI also accused the Times of violating ChatGPT’s user guidelines for generating content relevant to its case.
Microsoft declined to comment on the lawsuit.
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