Microsoft and OpenAI Can’t Use Copyrighted News Articles to Build their New Twelfth–Dimensional Enterprises
“This lawsuit is about how Microsoft and OpenAI are not entitled to use copyrighted newspaper content to build their new trillion-dollar enterprises, without paying for that content,” according to the suit.
The publications are owned by the hedge fund and they claim that Microsoft and OpenAI trained on their articles without compensation or permission. The evidence in the case was excerpts from conversations between chatGPT and Copilot, which showed that the bot’s training had included excerpts of certain articles.
They also showed screens of Copilot, a tool that can be utilized to search the web in real time and reproduce entire news articles without a hyperlink back to the original article. The companies also claim that chatbots often attribute false facts or hallucinations to publications.
Companies that use copyrighted material for their Artificial Intelligence models must obtain the publishers consent to use, and pay fair value for such use.
The suit says the Chicago Tribune recommended an infant lounger that wasn’t endorsed by the paper. In fact, the product the chatbot mentions had been linked to infant deaths and recalled.
In another example noted by the suit, ChatGPT was asked if smoking cures asthma, and the chatbot fabricated that The Denver Post published research indicating that smoking can be a cure for asthma. That claim is false, as the paper never published such research.
“This issue is not just a business problem for a handful of newspaper or the newspaper industry at large,” lawyers for the newspapers wrote in the suit. It’s important for civil life in America.
OpenAI sues OpenAI, Microsoft for copyright infringement: The ALden Global Capital lawsuit filed against the OpenAI AI and its news partners
Openai along with its news partners sees immense potential for the use of AI to deepen publishers’ relationships with readers and enhance the news experience.
The newspapers are owned by the New York investment fund Alden Global Capital, which is being sued for using its copyrighted work to end.
The suit asks for the destruction of all of the models OpenAI uses, which is something that experts say would be nearly impossible to do without completely rebuilding its models.
Re-training an AI model could cost “on the order of a hundred million dollars for earlier models, and a billion or even multiple billions for future models,” said Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University and the author of the forthcoming book Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Make Sure That technology works for us.
Marcus said trying to filter out copyrighted material from a dataset can be complicated because even if there was a master list of all the URLs that had to be removed, sites like Reddit often include versions of copyrighted stories in posts, meaning there is “no guarantee that you won’t have scraped copies from elsewhere on the internet,” Marcus added.
Together, the legal challenges are set to be a high-stakes court battle pitting one of the world’s leading AI companies against news publishers, duking it out over an area of law that experts say is unresolved and murky.
Yet OpenAI has long claimed that its so-called “large language models,” hoover up vast amounts of data from all corners of the internet under what is known as the “fair use” doctrine.
Under that legal theory, copyrighted works can be used without permission if certain criteria are met, like if it is substantially changed, or if the new work does not compete with the original.
Source: Eight newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft for copyright infringement
The Legal Case of OpenAI and its Implications to Financial Times and the Business News, and the Dispute About Its Legal Consequences
Yet legal scholars have said it is far from certain that the law is on the on the side of AI companies, and it will likely take years of court battles and a long appeals process to determine whether leading technology firms like OpenAI have violated the law or not.
Other publishers have chosen to take a more conciliatory path with the company. The Financial Times has agreements with Openai to be paid for use of copyrighted material.