The news business has a new and strong friend in the fight against OpenAI.

The nation’s oldest nonprofit newsroom, the Centre for Investigative Reporting, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its principal sponsor, Microsoft, in federal court on Thursday, citing claimed copyright infringement. This lawsuit followed suit from newspapers such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and the New York Daily News.

The CIR claimed that OpenAI “copied, used, abridged, and displayed CIR’s valuable content without CIR’s permission or authorization, and without any compensation to CIR” in the lawsuit, which was filed in the Southern District of New York.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, which went live in late 2022, has been searching the web for responses to user inquiries. It frequently uses text that has been taken straight from of news articles.

“When they populated their training sets with works of journalism, Defendants had a choice: to respect works of journalism, or not,” the plaintiffs wrote in the lawsuit. “Defendants chose the latter.”

The nonprofit’s CEO, Monika Bauerlein, charged the defendants with “free rider behaviour” in a news statement.

“OpenAI and Microsoft started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more powerful, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organizations that license our material,” Bauerlein said.

Mother Jones and the radio show Reveal are produced by the CIR, which also claimed in the lawsuit that OpenAI “trained ChatGPT not to acknowledge or respect copyright.” They took all of this action without authorization.

Referring to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the organisation stated that it is pursuing “actual damages and Defendants’ profits, or statutory damages of no less than $750 per infringed work and $2,500 per DMCA violation.”

There were no comments from Microsoft.

“We are working collaboratively with the news industry and partnering with global news publishers to display their content in our products like ChatGPT, including summaries, quotes, and attribution, to drive traffic back to the original articles,” an OpenAI spokesperson said.

“A component of the partnerships is the ability to leverage publisher content using various machine learning and training techniques to help us optimize the display of that content and make it more useful to users.”

Since it is often difficult for the news industry to continue generating enough income from advertising and subscriptions to cover the expenses of its expensive newsgathering operations, many newspapers are attempting to defend their brands as AI-generated content becomes more common.

The New York Times launched a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI in December, claiming that the latter two companies had violated their intellectual property rights by using its journalistic material as training data for ChatGPT. In a petition in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, The Times stated that it intends to make Microsoft and OpenAI liable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” connected to the “unlawful copying and use of the Times’s uniquely valuable works.” OpenAI took issue with how the Times described what happened.

In April, the Chicago Tribune and seven other newspapers filed a similar lawsuit.

A number of well-known American writers, namely Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last year, claiming that the company had violated their copyright by utilising their writings to train ChatGPT.

However, other news outlets are collaborating with OpenAI rather than preparing for battle. Time magazine and OpenAI announced a “multi-year content deal” earlier on Thursday, which would provide OpenAI access to both current and past pieces from Time’s more than 100-year history.

According to a news release, OpenAI will be allowed to utilise Time’s information “to enhance its products,” most likely to train its artificial intelligence models, and show Time’s content within its ChatGPT chatbot in answer to customer inquiries.

In May, OpenAI and News Corp. announced a similar collaboration that will provide OpenAI access to both live and past content from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, the New York Post, and other outlets. In May, Reddit also said that it will collaborate with OpenAI, enabling the latter to use Reddit material to train its artificial intelligence models.

(Adapted from BusinessToday.in)

Categories: Economy & Finance, Regulations & Legal, Strategy, Uncategorized