The NY Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI

In a legal complaint filed last week, the NY Times became the first major US media organization to sue both Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement – or the legal equivalent of telling a teacher that someone else copied your homework.

The lawsuit claims the tech companies used millions of pieces of NYT content to train their AI models, and continue to draw on that material to serve up answers – all without the newspaper’s permission.

It also cites several examples where OpenAI and Microsoft’s AI products pulled a Shia LeBouf and provided near-verbatim excerpts from NYT articles that would otherwise require a subscription.

The paper says it sued after failing to reach an agreement with the tech firms on a potential commercial licensing deal, similar to ones OpenAI previously signed with the Associated Press and German media giant Axel Springer.

• The NYT is asking for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages,” as well as a court order forcing Microsoft and OpenAI to destroy AI models or datasets that incorporate the NYT’s work.

📸 Big picture: The NYT’s legal complaint is the latest in a series of ongoing lawsuits seeking to limit AI companies’ alleged use of copyrighted content to train their models. OpenAI is already facing copyright lawsuits from prominent authors, including George R. R. Martin, John Grisham, and Jodi Picoult. Stable Diffusion, a leading AI image generator, is being sued by Getty Images on similar grounds.