The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming the two companies now "directly compete" with the outlet's content by "copying and using" millions of the publication's articles to build their own artificial intelligence models. As outlined in the lawsuit, the New York Times claims that OpenAI and Microsoft's Large Language Models (LLMs) - the powerhouses of ChatGPT and Copilot - "can generate output that recites verbatim content from the New York Times, carefully summarizes the content of the New York Times, and mimics its delivery style."
The media said that this "undermined and harmed" the relationship between The New York Times and its readers, while also depriving The New York Times of "subscription, licensing, advertising and affiliate revenue."
At the same time, the lawsuit also claims that releasing artificial intelligence models trained on New York Times content has proven to be "very profitable" for Microsoft and OpenAI. The publication claims that it has been trying to negotiate with the two companies for months to "ensure fair value for the use of their content," but has been unable to reach a resolution.
The New York Times is one of many news organizations to ban OpenAI's web crawler, preventing the artificial intelligence company from scraping content from its website and using it to train its artificial intelligence models.
The New York Times sued the two companies for copyright infringement, demanding "billions of dollars in legal and actual damages" for allegedly plagiarizing its work. "Through Microsoft's Bing Chat (recently renamed 'Copilot') and OpenAI's ChatGPT, the defendants sought to leverage The New York Times' substantial investment in its journalism to create alternative products without permission or compensation," the lawsuit states.