The New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement while training ChatGPT. The lawsuit also names Microsoft as a defendant and says the firms should be held responsible for ‘billions of dollars’ in damages.
ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) ‘learn’ by analysing a massive amount of data often sourced online.
The lawsuit claims ‘millions’ of articles published by the New York Times were used without permission to make ChatGPT smarter and claims the tool is now competing with the newspaper as a trustworthy information source.
It alleges that when asked about current events, ChatGPT will sometimes generate ‘verbatim excerpts’ from New York Times articles, which cannot be accessed without paying for a subscription.
According to the lawsuit, readers can get New York Times content without paying for it — meaning it is losing out on subscription revenue and advertising clicks from people visiting the website.
It also gave the example of the Bing search engine — which has some features powered by ChatGPT — producing results taken from a New York Times-owned website without linking to the article or including referral links it uses to generate income.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, 27 December 2023, in a Manhattan federal court, reveals the New York Times unsuccessfully approached Microsoft and OpenAI in April to seek ‘an amicable resolution’ over its copyright.
If you would like to see some examples of this alleged plagiarism, I suggest you read Things Are About to Get a Lot Worse for Generative AI by Gary Marcus on Substack.
Are writers likely to be sued?
Gary’s article inspired me to write this story and ask him, “Is a user of Dall-E or Chat-GPT who unwittingly infringes copyright also open to a lawsuit?”
Gary replied, “Absolutely. Disney doesn’t care if you knew or didn’t know you infringed. As I understand (not a lawyer, not legal advice), OpenAI will maybe indemnify you but may try to say you didn’t follow ToS. If they can show you didn’t, they won’t be obliged by their ToS to indemnify. Midjourney, I think, will not indemnify.”
It looks as if Dall-E does have some checks in place. When I asked Bing Images to create an image that showed “William Shakespeare being sued in a court of law”, I was warned that I had infringed content regulations and that if I continued infringing these regulations, I would have my account suspended.
I didn’t realise that Shakespeare’s works are still under copyright.