The artificial intelligence technology used by OpenAI and Microsoft to train ChatGPT along with other services that give users instant access to information has been accused by the New York Times of copyright infringement. The technology is now in competition with the Times. The lawsuit was filed because the companies claim that their technology illegally imitated millions of Times articles.
The latest legal action in a series of cases aimed at restricting the use of purportedly extensive content scraping from the internet — without payment — for the purpose of training “large language artificial intelligence models.” Actors, authors, journalists, and other creative professionals who publish their works online worry that artificial intelligence (AI) will use their work as a basis and create rival chatbots and other information sources without paying them fairly.
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However, the Times is the first of the big news organizations to file a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, the two most well-known AI companies. Microsoft (MSFT) is a multibillionaire investor in OpenAI and holds a seat on the board of the company.
The Times stated in a complaint it filed on Wednesday that although it has an obligation to notify its subscribers, its ability to do so is threatened by Microsoft and OpenAI’s “illegal use of The Times’s work to develop products based on AI that compete with it.” Although OpenAI and Microsoft “given Times content particular emphasis” in their “widespread copying,” the paper pointed out that they also used other sources in their attempt “to free-ride on The Times’s enormous expenditure in its journalism by using it to construct substitutive products without authorization or payment.”
“We are dedicated to collaborating with content creators and the owners to guarantee they profit from artificial intelligence (AI) technology and fresh revenue models,” OpenAI stated in a statement issued by spokeswoman Lindsey Held. “We respect their rights.” We’ve been having fruitful and forward-looking discussions via the New York Times, so we’re shocked and disappointed by this development. As we do with many other publishers, we hope that we can work together in a way that benefits both of us. Requests for comment regarding the lawsuit were not answered by Microsoft.
According to The Times’ complaint, it was aware months prior that its work had been utilised to train the companies’ massive language models, and it had a problem with that. The Times claimed that it started talks with Microsoft and OpenAI in April in order to establish terms of a contract and obtain just compensation.
However, the Times claims that it has not been able to work out a settlement with the businesses. According to the complaint, Microsoft and OpenAI contend that the Times’ works qualify for “fair use,” which permits them to use copyrighted content for a “transformative purpose.”
The Times vehemently disagreed, arguing that ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot—also referred to as “copilot”—can offer a comparable service to that of the New York Times.
The Times claimed in its complaint that “there is nothing ‘transformative’ about using The Times’s content for free to develop products that compete with The Times and steal viewers away from it.” “Copying Times works for this reason is not fair use, as the Defendants’ GenAI models’ outputs closely resemble and compete with the data that was used to train them.”
Retaliating against artificial intelligence
A number of prestigious newsrooms, blocked GPTBot, web crawler, OpenAI’s regarding searching the platforms they use for content earlier this year by adding code to their websites. This includes The Times.
Comedian Sarah Silverman as well as the two authors filed separate yet connected lawsuits against Meta and OpenAI in July, claiming that the companies’ AI language models had been taught on copyrighted content from their books without any of their knowledge or approval. Regarding the lawsuit, neither business has responded. In November, a judge threw out the majority of the lawsuit’s allegations.
In September, a group of well-known fiction writers joined forces with the Authors Guild to file a separate class action lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the company’s technology is using their copyrighted works illegally.
The Times claims in its lawsuit that the datasets “likely applied millions of Times-owned works” to train the most current OpenAI broad language models, which underpin its AI tools. The complaint states that the website of the New York Times is the 3rd most highly portrayed source of information in a 2019 English-language a snapshot of any of those datasets, known as Common Crawl and referred to as a “copy of the internet.” The database of US patent applications and Wikipedia are the two most highly represented sources of information.
The Times asserts that due to the way the AI tools are trained on its articles, they can produce output that, according to scores of examples, “generates output that repeats Times content verbatim, strongly summarises it, and closely mimics its expressive style.” Additionally, these tools incorrectly credit The Times with misleading information.
One incident that is mentioned in the complaint involved ChatGPT giving a user access to the first three sections of the Pulitzer Prize-winning article “Snow Fit: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” in 2012. The user had complained in the chat about being unable to read the article because they had hit the Times paywall.
The news outlet further claims that in order to generate longer and more thorough results than conventional search engines, Microsoft’s Bing engine for searching, which was updated earlier this year using OpenAI’s technology, “copies and categorises” Times content.
The complaint claims that “Defendants’ tools undermine or damage The Times’s connection with its readers as well as strip The Times of membership, licencing, advertising, or affiliate revenue by offering Times content despite The Times’s permission or authorization.”
Confrontational style with OpenAI
Unlike the Associated Press and Germany’s Axel Springer, which have content deals with OpenAI, The New York Times took a more aggressive stance against the abrupt rise of AI chatbots with the suit.
With the launch of ChatGPT last year, Microsoft, the second-biggest company in the world based on market capitalization, quickly integrated artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into its own products and is a significant investor in OpenAI.
For years, internet content was used to train the AI models that drive ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot (formerly Bing), with the understanding that such content could be used fairly and without requiring payment.
However, the lawsuit contended that the Times’s capacity to produce high-caliber journalism was in jeopardy due to the unauthorised use of its content to create artificial intelligence products.
“Independent content and reporting that is only accessible because we and others have reported, edited, and verified it at great expense and with significant expertise were used in the construction of these tools,” a Times spokesperson stated.
According to The Times, it communicated with Microsoft as well as OpenAI during April to voice concerns regarding the usage of its trademarks and find a solution.
The newspaper stated during the discussions that it aimed to “make sure it received fair value” for the use of its content, “support the responsible development of GenAI technology in a way that benefits society and encourages an informed public,” and “facilitate the continuation of an effective news ecosystem.”
The lawsuit stated, “There has been no resolution as a result of these negotiations.”
The lawsuit claimed that Copilot and ChatGPT’s content closely resembled the style of the New York Times and that the publication’s content was given preference in the development of chatbot technology.
It further stated that content that turned out to be untrue had the NY Times as an incorrect source.
An increase in litigation
The newspaper is one more person and publisher attempting to prevent AI behemoths from using copyrighted content.
George R.R. Martin, the author of Game of Thrones, and other well-known authors of fiction submitted a class-action lawsuit towards OpenAI last year, alleging the startup had infringed their copyrights in order to power ChatGPT.
A letter accusing the chief executives of OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and other artificial intelligence developers of engaging in exploitative practices by creating chat bots that “mimic and ingest” writers’ language, ideas, and styles was signed by over 4,000 writers in June.
In a US court, the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is being sued by Universal and various other music publishers for purportedly employing copyrighted lyrics to educate its algorithms and provide responses to user inquiries.
The US photo seller Getty Images has charged Stability AI of making money off of its own and its partners’ photos in order to develop visual AI that can produce unique images on demand.
Due to the increasing number of lawsuits, Google and Microsoft have declared that they will defend clients who are accused of copyright violations involving AI-generated content.
This month, lawmakers in the European Union reached a historic agreement on regulations pertaining to artificial intelligence. The laws mandate that tech companies operating within the EU reveal the data utilised for product testing and AI system training, particularly for high-risk applications like healthcare and self-driving cars.
Joe Biden, the US president, given an executive order in October addressing the effects of AI on discrimination and national security, while China has implemented laws mandating AI to adhere to “socialist core values.”
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