The New York Times building in New York on February 1, 2022.
Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images
The NYT said in a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that it is seeking to hold Microsoft and OpenAI accountable for the “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” it believes it is owed for its “illegal copying and use of the unique valuable works of The Times’.
CNBC has reached out to Microsoft and OpenAI for comment.
The Times said in an emailed statement that it “recognizes the power and potential of GenAI for the public and journalism,” but added that journalistic material should be used for commercial gain with permission from the original source.
“These tools were built with, and continue to use, independent journalism and content that is only available because we and our peers reported, edited and vetted it at high cost and with significant expertise,” the Times said.
“Established copyright law protects our journalism and content. If Microsoft and OpenAI want to use our work for commercial purposes, the law requires them to get our permission first. They haven’t.”
The New York Times is represented in the proceeding by Susman Godfrey, the litigation firm that represented Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News that resulted in a $787.5 million settlement.
Susman Godfrey also represents author Julian Sancton and other authors in a separate lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft that accuses the companies of using copyrighted material without permission to train multiple versions of ChatGPT.
The NYT is one of a number of media organizations seeking damages from companies behind some of the most advanced generic AI models for the alleged use of their content to train AI programs.
OpenAI is the creator of GPT, a large language model that can produce human-like content in response to user prompts. It does this thanks to billions of parameters worth of data, taken from public web data through 2021.
This has created a dilemma for publishers and media creators, who find their own content being used and repurposed by generative AI models such as ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. In many cases, the content produced by these programs can resemble the source material.
OpenAI tried to assuage the concerns of news publishers. In December, the company announced a partnership with Axel Springer — the parent company of Business Insider, Politico and European outlets Bild and Welt — that would license its OpenAI content for a fee.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In its lawsuit Wednesday, the Times accused Microsoft and OpenAI of creating a business model based on “massive copyright infringement,” saying the companies’ AI systems “were used to create multiple reproductions of The Times’ intellectual property for the purpose of the creation of the GPT. models that exploit and, in many cases, retain large portions of the copyrighted expression contained in those works.”
— CNBC’s Rohan Goswami contributed to this report