New York Times Sues Microsoft and OpenAINew York Times Building. Credit: Getty Images

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, Times Group alleges that OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, uses their published work to train artificial intelligence technologies, accusing them of infringing copyright and abusing the newspaper’s intellectual property. Microsoft is also named as a defendant in the case, which claims the companies should pay “billions of dollars” in damages.

The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in a Manhattan federal court reveals that There is no  exact monetary demand in the lawsuit. However, it states that “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” resulting from “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s valuable works” should be attributed to the defendants. Additionally, it demands that any chatbot models and training data utilising copyrighted content be destroyed by the corporations.

The Times Group claims that ChatGPT may occasionally provide “verbatim excerpts” from New York Times stories when questioned about current affairs; these cannot be read without a subscription.

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The complaint claims that because of this, readers can access New York Times material without having to pay for it, which means the publication is missing out on subscription income and website ad hits. It also provided an example of how the Bing search engine, which uses ChatGPT for some of its features, pulled results from a website owned by the New York Times without providing a link to the story or the referral links that it used to generate income. The Times Group fear that as generative AI chatbots become more common, less visitors will click on to their website, which would reduce traffic and income.

In Response Microsoft chose not to address the matter. OpenAI did not immediately provide any comment.

By Aditya Patel

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