An American newspaper goes to war with AI giants. We’re talking about billions of dollars in losses

The daily – as it writes in an article published on Wednesday – is “the first large American media organization” to take up the fight against AI giants for respect for copyrights. The New York Times believes that both Microsoft and OpenAI are making huge amounts of money from other people’s work without the knowledge or consent of the authors and publishers.

The New York Times sues Microsoft and OpenAI. He talks about copying texts

In the lawsuit, which was filed in a New York court on Wednesday, the NYT claims that both companies use the newspaper’s legally protected materials in their artificial intelligence models without appropriate consent. The lawsuit says the case involves “millions” of articles published by the New York daily that were used to train Microsoft’s ChatGPT OpenAI and Copilot chatbots, which “now compete with the news site as a source of credible information.”

The newspaper believes that both models were not only trained on the protected content of its authors, but can now “recite” or describe texts appearing in the daily, and even “imitate the expressive style” of NYT articles. included, among others: screenshots showing the defendant companies’ chatbot responses that are said to be based on the newspaper’s works and describing specific instances of conversations with chatbots.

The newspaper’s lawyers believe that using other people’s works was an extremely lucrative practice for Microsoft and OpenAI and allowed them to contribute to increasing the capitalization of the former company by one trillion dollars and the latter by USD 90 billion. However, the practice was and is harmful to “quality journalism”.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in an increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published works to train artificial intelligence technologies

– writes a daily describing the lawsuit.

Microsoft and OpenAI may pay billions of dollars in fines?

“NYT” notes that in April it contacted both companies to “express concerns” about the use of other people’s intellectual property and agree on an amicable solution to the matter. These talks “did not bring a solution”, so the newspaper had to go to court.

The lawyers are demanding that Microsoft and OpenAI completely “destroy all chatbot models and training data” that were created using “protected content” published by the New York Times. The lawsuit did not specify a specific amount for damages, saying only that the defendants should be held legally liable for causing “statutory and actual damages” worth “billions of dollars.”

Lindsey Held, a spokeswoman for OpenAI, said in a comment to the New York Times that the company “respects the rights of creators and content owners and is committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from artificial intelligence technologies and new revenue models.” The organization also hopes to find a “mutually beneficial way of working together” with the publisher. Microsoft, in turn, refused to comment on this matter to “NYT”.