(Finance) – Violation of copyright for unauthorized use of one’s articles. With this accusation the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI. The two technology companies exploited its contents without permission to create their artificial intelligence products and train both the OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and Microsoft’s Copilot. According to the New York Times, these two tools have been trained on millions of newspaper contents and continue to draw on material to provide answers to user requests. The New York Times is asking the Southern District Court of New York for damages – estimated in billions of dollars related to the illegal copying and use of the paper’s work – a ban on technology companies from using its content and the destruction of every chatbot model that used newspaper material. “The Times’ journalism is the work of thousands of journalists, whose employment costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year,” the newspaper said in the complaint, noting that the two companies avoided “spending the billions of dollars that the newspaper invested in the creation of that work, using it without permission or compensation.”
In the documents filed with the court, the New York Times paints ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence systems as potential competitors in the publishing industry: chatbots can in fact respond on many topics, even current ones, basing their statements on articles from the New York Times and therefore discouraging users from visiting the site. The newspaper cites examples of chatbots that offered answers taken almost word for word from its articles, which would require a subscription to access. The newspaper’s lawyers also highlight the potential damage to the brand caused by so-called “hallucinations”, i.e. those phenomena in which chatbots report false information which is then incorrectly attributed to a source.
THE two technological giants have sought to “take advantage of the New York Times’ massive investments” in journalism and have used its “unpaid content to create products” that can draw audiences away from the newspaper, the lawsuit says.
The fears aboutuncompensated use of intellectual property by artificial intelligence systems they have long been widespread across the creative industries given AI’s ability to imitate natural language and generate sophisticated written responses on virtually any topic. The lawsuit is set to have major repercussions on the legal contours of generative AI and could have huge implications for the media as well.
“If the New York Times and other organizations cannot produce and protect their independent journalism, there will be a void that no computer and no artificial intelligence can fill,” the statement read.legal action –. With less journalism produced, the cost to society will be enormous.”
(Photo: Haxorjoe CC BY-SA 3.0)