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The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging that millions of its articles were used to train the companies' AI models without permission.
According to the lawsuit, the Times says OpenAI and Microsoft’s large language models (LLMs) “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style.”
The LLMs power the company’s chatbots, ChatGPT and Copilot.
The Times claims that while the companies used content from a variety of sources to train their LLMs, they “gave Times content particular emphasis when building their LLMs—revealing a preference that recognizes the value of those works.”
According to the suit, the companies are liable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” for using the paper’s content. It has requested that not only should the companies be prevented from using its works to train its AI models in the future, they should also be required to remove the Times’ work from their existing datasets.
The New York Times is one of many publications Microsoft and OpenAI have reportedly used to train their LLMs. In recent months CNN, Reuters, and the BBC have all blocked OpenAI’s web crawler from scraping their websites for content.
Not all publications are against the idea; however. The Associated Press has given OpenAI access to its news stories for the next two years to train AI, and Politico and Business Insider also struck deals with the companies to use their content.