Trouble for Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement is not coming to an end, as they face several lawsuits for violating copyrights.
On Tuesday, eight US newspaper publishers sued Microsoft for illegally reusing articles in AI products.
The 98-page long lawsuit further accused the tech companies of attributing erroneous information to the publishers.
The eight newspapers that have filed the lawsuits include the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune.
They allege that OpenAI’s ChatGPT used their copyrighted articles to perfect its language models without permission.
The lawsuit was filed in a New York federal court on Tuesday. The publishers claim that OpenAI’s large language models, GPT-2 and GPT-3, were perfected using datasets containing text from their newspapers.
The language models are designed to produce text based on human inputs and reproduce copies of the publishers’ works. Microsoft has been indicted for using newspapers for its Bing search index but seldom provided links to the original articles. Four months ago, The New York Times also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the tech giant of using data from its past content. It also asked for consent for usage, criticizing the use of full article excerpts in chatbot responses.
The latest lawsuit filed by the eight news outlets also demanded consent and fair value for using their content to perfect the AI language models. The lawsuit alleged that the AI tools literally regurgitate their content without directing users to the content source.
The lawsuit filings stated, “This lawsuit arises from defendants purloining millions of the publishers’ copyrighted articles without permission and without payment to fuel the commercialization of their generative artificial intelligence products, including ChatGPT and (Microsoft’s) Copilot.”
The eight newspapers that instituted the lawsuits are as follows:
- The New York Daily News and The Chicago Tribune, both owned by Alden Global Capital
- The Orlando Sentinel
- The Sun Sentinel
- The San Jose Mercury News
- The Denver Post
- The Orange County Register
- The St. Paul Pioneer Press
OpenAI’s Response
OpenAI did not directly respond to the accusations but stated that it takes great care to support the news and media outlets. It also stated it is in continuous partnerships and conversations with various news outlets around the world to explore new opportunities, discuss problems, and seek out solutions.
Microsoft also stated that OpenAI has entered into fruitful partnerships with a number of publishers, which includes The Financial Times, The Associated Press, Spanish conglomerate Prisa Media, and Germany’s Axel Springer.
