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New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger
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As artificial intelligence products from tech giants threaten to upend the media landscape, major newspaper and magazine companies have faced a dilemma: take the money from AI giants in a licensing deal or fight with a lawsuit.
On Wednesday, The New York Times chose the latter, filing a lawsuit in the U.S. Southern District of New York against OpenAI, the Sam Altman-run firm behind the ChatGPT product that has amassed more than 100 million users since a version of it went public in late 2022. The popular chat bot was built by data scrapped from across the internet and delivers its customizable responses to user queries and prompts by leaning on this vast trove of writing.
The newspaper company says that it had reached out to OpenAI in April of last year to strike a deal for licensing its content as well as for terms that included “technological guardrails that would allow a mutually beneficial value exchange between Defendants and The Times.” The company added: “These efforts have not produced a resolution.”
The complaint claims the the newspaper company had “objected after it discovered that Defendants were using Times content without permission to develop their models and tools.” The suit states it took the legal action “to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”
Interestingly, as to where the Times claims OpenAI has infringed on its copyright for articles, the complaint notes that the tech company created a data set, titled WebText, culled from large amounts of content on Reddit. And, within users posts on Reddit, there “contains a staggering amount of scraped content from The Times.”
“As part of training the GPT models, Microsoft and OpenAI collaborated to develop a complex, bespoke supercomputing system to house and reproduce copies of the training dataset, including copies of The Times-owned content,” the complaint alleges. “Millions of Times Works were copied and ingested —multiple times — for the purpose of ‘training’ Defendants’ GPT models.”
More to come.
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