American Newspaper Publishers Sue Microsoft and OpenAI for Unauthorized Use of Articles
Eight major American newspaper publishers have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing the companies of using their copyrighted articles without permission or payment. The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court, alleges that Microsoft's Copilot assistant and OpenAI's ChatGPT have been trained on data sets containing text from the publishers' newspapers, enabling them to generate near-verbatim copies of the publishers' works.
The publishers, which include the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, claim that Microsoft and OpenAI have not obtained the necessary licenses to use their copyrighted material. They also allege that Microsoft uses information from their newspapers for its Bing search index without always providing links to the original articles.
This lawsuit follows a similar one filed by The New York Times against OpenAI four months ago. The Times accused OpenAI of using its articles to train its GPT-3 language model without permission, resulting in the model generating text that was "virtually identical" to the Times' articles.
The publishers are seeking damages from Microsoft and OpenAI for the unauthorized use of their copyrighted material. They are also asking the court to order the companies to stop using their articles without permission.