Journalism just gained a powerful ally in its fight against OpenAI.
The Center for Investigative Reporting is the oldest nonprofit newsroom in the United States. be accused OpenAI and key supporters Microsoft On Thursday, a federal court filed similar lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement by publications including New York Timesthe Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News.
CIR claims in the lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, that OpenAI “reproduced, used, abridged and displayed CIR’s valuable content without CIR’s permission or authorization and without providing any compensation to CIR.”
Since its public release in late 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot has been crawling the web providing answers to user queries, often relying heavily on transcripts pulled directly from news reports.
“When they added journalistic works to their training sets, defendants had a choice: whether to respect the journalistic works,” the plaintiffs wrote in the lawsuit. “Defendants chose the latter.”
In a press release Thursday, the nonprofit’s chief executive, Monika Bauerlein, accused the defendants of “free riding.”
“OpenAI and Microsoft began cleaning up our story to make their products more powerful, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organizations that license our material,” Bauerlein said.
CIR, home to “Mother Jones” and the audio show “Reveal,” also claims in the lawsuit that OpenAI “trained ChatGPT not to recognize or respect copyright. And they did all this without permission.”
The group said it was seeking “actual damages and profits for Defendants, or statutory damages of not less than $750 per work infringed, and statutory damages of not less than $2,500 for each DMCA violation,” referring to ” Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
As the news industry generally struggles to maintain enough advertising and subscription revenue to pay for its expensive newsgathering operations, many publications are actively working to protect their businesses as AI-generated content becomes more commonplace.
In December last year, the New York Times filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing them of infringing intellectual property rights by news content appearing in ChatGPT training materials. According to a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District, The New York Times said it seeks to hold Microsoft and OpenAI liable for “billions of dollars in statutory damages” related to “the unlawful copying and use of The New York Times’ unique and valuable works.” and actual losses”. New York District. OpenAI disagrees with the New York Times’ version of events.
The Chicago Tribune and seven other newspapers followed Similar sets in April.
Outside of the news, a group of well-known American writers, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George RR Martin and Jodi Picoult, sued OpenAI last year, accusing them of copyright infringement by using their own works to train ChatGPT.
But not all news organizations are ready for battle, and some have joined forces with OpenAI. Earlier Thursday, OpenAI and Time magazine announced a “multiyear content agreement” that will give OpenAI access to current and archived articles from Time magazine’s more than 100-year history.
OpenAI will be able to display Time Magazine content in its ChatGPT chatbot to answer user questions. Press releaseand uses Time magazine content to “enhance its products,” or possibly train its artificial intelligence models.
OpenAI announced a similar partnership in May News Corp, allowing OpenAI to access current and archived articles from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, The New York Post, and other publications. Reddit also announced in May that it would be partnering with OpenAI to allow the company to train its artificial intelligence models on Reddit content.
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