The New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for using text without permission

Hey New York times On Wednesday, legal action was taken against Microsoft and Artificial Intelligence (AI) company. OpenAIHe accused them of using texts from the newspaper without permission to train their artificial intelligence models.

According to the newspaper, millions of articles were used to improve the “chat programs” with which the media are now forced to compete in the information sector.

“Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently renamed ‘Copilot’) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the defendants seek to capitalize on The Times’ massive investment in its journalism, and use it to build alternative products without permission or payment.” Reads the legal procedure documentwhich was submitted to a Manhattan court.

The newspaper is not asking for specific financial compensation, but it intends to hold the companies liable for “billions of dollars” in damages and wants to destroy artificial intelligence models that use copyrighted information from The New York Times.

As part of the procedure, examples of several texts produced by GPT-4 (an OpenAI product) are included, which are almost indistinguishable from some of the investigations published by the paper.

Furthermore, they showed that Microsoft's Bing search engine allows you to copy entire paragraphs of news from The Times, which requires a subscription to access much of the content.

Artificially intelligent “chatbots”, such as ChatGPT, use vast amounts of text data to predict the most likely word in response to a question, and are thus able to recreate human speech with surprising accuracy.

However, in many cases, texts used to train the model, such as books or journal articles, are protected by copyright and more and more authors and companies are demanding compensation for the use of their work.

At the beginning of the month, OpenAI, whose lead investor is Microsoft, reached an agreement with Axel Springer, which publishes Politico, Business Insider and Bild, to use its content for a fee.