WASHINGTON: A group of US newspapers, including the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune, on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI in New York federal court, accusing them of misusing reporters’ work to train their artificial intelligence systems.
The eight newspapers, owned by Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group, said in the case that the companies copied millions of their articles unlawfully to train AI products, including Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Microsoft and OpenAI have already been facing such lawsuits from other companies.
An OpenAI spokesperson on Tuesday said the company takes great care in its products and design process to support news organizations. A spokesperson for Microsoft refused to comment on the issue.
The newspaper cases are among several lawsuits brought by copyright owners against tech companies for using their data to train AI systems.
A lawyer for the MediaNews publications, Steven Lieberman, told the media that OpenAI owed its remarkable success to the works of others.
The lawsuit said Microsoft and OpenAI’s systems used the newspapers’ copyrighted content “verbatim”.
It said ChatGPT also hallucinates articles of the newspapers that damage their reputations, including a fake Denver Post article terming smoking as an asthma cure and a bogus Chicago Tribune recommendation for an infant lounger.
Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register, and Twin Cities Pioneer Press are included in the plaintiffs.
They appealed to the court for unspecified monetary damages and an order blocking any further infringement of copyrights.
