Microsoft and OpenAI are being sued by a consortium of newspapers that includes the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, and Orlando Sentinel, according to The Verge news. The companies are being accused by the eight publications in this lawsuit, all owned by Alden Capital Group (ACG), of “purloining millions” of their copyrighted articles “without permission and without payment to fuel the commercialization of their generative artificial intelligence products, including ChatGPT and Copilot.”
This case is only the most recent one brought against Microsoft and OpenAI for using copyrighted content without the authors’ express permission. Famously, in late December of last year, the New York Times sued the corporations on the grounds that they had utilized “almost a century’s worth of copyrighted content.” They did not have a previous licensing arrangement, but their products can reproduce Times stories verbatim and “mimic its expressive style,” the magazine stated. Microsoft accused the Times of apocalyptic futurology in a move to dismiss important portions of the case, arguing that generative AI might endanger independent journalism.
ACG’s newspapers complain of the same thing, that the companies’ chatbots are reproducing their articles word-for-word shortly after they’re published without a prominent link back to the sources. They included several examples in their complaint. In addition, the chatbots are apparently suffering from hallucinations and are attributing inaccurate reporting to ACG’s publications. The publisher argued that the defendants pay for the computers, the specialized chips and the electricity they use to build and operate their generative AI products. And yet they’re using copyrighted articles “without permission and without paying for the privilege” even though they need content to train their large language models. The plaintiffs referenced OpenAI’s previous admission that it would be “impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”
OpenAI is no longer a non-profit company, the plaintiffs said, and is now valued at $90 billion. Meanwhile, ChatGPT and Copilot have added “hundreds of billions of dollars to Microsoft’s market value.” The publications are seeking an unspecified amount in damages and are asking the court to order the defendants to destroy GPT and LLM models that use their materials.
