The American news organisation New York Times is suing OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, alleging that the company’s copyright was violated when training the system. The lawsuit also names Microsoft as a defendant and says the companies should be liable for “billions of dollars” in damages. ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) “learn” by analysing large amounts of data, often accessed online.
The BBC has contacted OpenAI and Microsoft for comment.
The lawsuit alleges that “millions” of articles published by The New York Times were used without its permission to make ChatGPT smarter and alleges that the tool now competes with the newspaper as a trusted source of information. It is alleged that when asked questions about current events, ChatGPT sometimes generates “text excerpts” from New York Times articles that cannot be accessed without paying a subscription.
According to Technology News UK, readers can get New York Times content without paying for it, meaning they miss out on subscription revenue and advertising clicks from visitors to the site.
He also gave the example of the Bing search engine, which has some features supported by ChatGPT and returns results from a New York Times website without linking to the article or including referral links used to generate revenue.
