The lawsuit claimed that “millions” of articles published by the New York Times were used without its permission to make ChatGPT smarter, and claims the tool is now competing with the newspaper as a trustworthy information source.

Washington: The New York Times sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Microsoft in a US court on Wednesday, alleging that the companies’ powerful AI models used millions of articles for training without permission. The suit does not include an exact monetary demand. But it said the defendants should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”

The copyright infringement lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan federal court, claimed that while the companies copied information from many sources to build their systems, they give New York Times content “particular emphasis” and “seek to free-ride on the Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment”.

The lawsuit claimed that “millions” of articles published by the New York Times were used without its permission to make ChatGPT smarter, and claims the tool is now competing with the newspaper as a trustworthy information source.

It alleges that when asked about current events, ChatGPT will sometimes generate “verbatim excerpts” from New York Times articles, which cannot be accessed without paying for a subscription. It also appealed to the “vital” importance of the Times’s independent journalism to democracy, arguing that it is “increasingly rare and valuable”.

The “unlawful use” of the paper’s “copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more” to create artificial intelligence products “threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service”, the lawsuit claimed according to The Guardian.

Times negotiation with OpenAI and Microsoft

The Times, in its complaint, said that it objected when it discovered months ago that its work had been used to train the companies’ large language models. Starting in April, the Times said it began negotiating with OpenAI and Microsoft to receive fair compensation and set terms of an agreement.

But the Times alleges it has been unable to reach a resolution with the companies. Microsoft and OpenAI claim that the Times’ works are considered “fair use,” which gives them the ability to use copyrighted material for a “transformative purpose,” the complaint stated according to CNN.

The Times strongly objected to that claim, saying ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot (also known as “copilot”) can provide a similar service as the New York Times.

“There is nothing ‘transformative’ about using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it,” the Times said in its complaint. “Because the outputs of Defendants’ GenAI models compete with and closely mimic the inputs used to train them, copying Times works for that purpose is not fair use.”

The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works.