American daily newspaper, The New York Times has issued legal proceedings against Open AI and its largest shareholder, Microsoft, due to the alleged use of its content in generative AI programmes.
The New York times has issued proceedings over allegations that ‘millions’ of their articles have been used by Open AI as data to train chatbots such as Chat GPT and Copilot. The New York Times claim this constitutes an infringement of their copyright.
The daily newspaper is seeking billions of dollars in damages from the defendants and they have provided various examples to the court of Chat GPT generating verbatim copies of the New York Times written content which they claim supports their allegations of infringement. The content cannot ordinarily be accessed without a paid subscription.
This is not the first time that OpenAI has been subject to claims of copyright infringement, as a similar case was brought by a group of US authors back in September 2023. However, this is the first case to be filed by a major media organisation against OpenAI. It is to be seen if more certainty will be provided surrounding the intellectual property boundaries for generative artificial intelligence.
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