The New York Times sues Microsoft and OpenAI for using its texts without permission

The New York Times presented to request this Wednesday against Microsoft and the company artificial intelligence (TO THE) OpenAI Of use your messages without permission to train your AI models. According to media reports, millions of articles by him were used to refine the “chatbot” against those now seen forced to compete in the information sector.

“Through Chat with Microsoft Bing (recently renamed Copilot) e Open AI ChatGPTthe defendants try to take advantage of the huge investment by the New York Times in its journalismusing it for build replacement products without permission or payment“, reads the lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan court.

The newspaper does not require specific financial compensationbut the defendants are held responsible “billions of dollars” damage and that AI models using New York Times “copyrighted” information be destroyed.

As part of the lawsuit, examples of various texts produced by GPT-4 (one of OpenAI’s products) which are almost indistinguishable from some research published by the medium.

Additionally, they show that you can ask to copy Microsoft’s Bing search engine entire paragraphs of Times news, which requires a subscription read much of its content.

Where do AI chatbots get information from?

They use artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT huge amounts of text data predict the most likely word in response to a question, thus managing to recreate human language with surprising precision.

However, on many occasions, all those texts that are used to train the modellike books or press articles, they are protected by “copyright” and more and more authors and companies ask for compensation for the use of their work.

Earlier this month OpenAI, whose main investor is Microsoft, reached an agreement with the company Axel Springer, which publishes media Politician, Business Insider or Bildto use its contents in exchange for compensation.

THE copyright protection and the ability of artificial intelligence to “own” the content it generates even if it is based on texts by other authors is a problem that Microsoft and OpenAI have been facing for several months.

Last September, a group of authors sued the tech company for illegally using his property.

According to the complaint, filed publicly by authors Michael Chabon, David Henry Hwang, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman, OpenAI has benefited and even achieved economic gains after ChatGPT used the content of its productions to generate various texts.

“OpenAI’s acts of copyright infringement have been intentional, deliberate and with contempt for the plaintiffs“, indicates the complaint already in progress. It also adds that the company “knew that the data sets with which the generative artificial intelligence was trained contained protected materials”.