The “New York Times” is suing OpenAI. ChatGPT’s future could be at stake: NPR

A group of news organizations, led by The New York Timesis suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI in federal court Tuesday in a hearing that could determine whether the tech company should face publishers in a high-profile copyright infringement lawsuit.

Three lawsuits filed by publishers against OpenAI and its backer Microsoft have been merged into one case. At the head of each of the three combined cases are the Times, The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Tuesday’s hearing centers on OpenAI’s motion to dismiss, a critical step in the case in which a judge will either have to clear the litigation to move to trial or dismiss it.

The publishers’ main argument is that the data that powers ChatGPT includes millions of copyrighted works from news organizations, articles that publications say were used without consent or payment – which, according to the publishers, amounts to copyright infringement on a large scale.

“(OpenAI’s) illegal use of the Times’ work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens the Times’ ability to provide this service,” the newspaper’s lawyers wrote in an amended complaint filed in August 2023 “Using other people’s valuable intellectual property in this way, without paying, has been extremely lucrative for (OpenAI).”

OpenAI argued that the large amount of data used to train its artificial intelligence robot was protected by “fair use” rules. It is a doctrine in American law that permits the use of copyrighted material for educational, research, or comment purposes.

In order to meet the fair use test, the work in question must have transformed the copyrighted work into something new, and the new work cannot compete with the original in the same market , among other factors.

In a motion to dismiss, lawyers for Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, wrote that it was not illegal for OpenAI to ingest this journalistic text.

“In this case, The New York Times uses its might and its megaphone to challenge the latest profound technological advancement: the Large Language Model, or LLM,” Microsoft lawyers wrote in the court filing, describing the technology behind ChatGPT. “Despite the claims of the Times, copyright law is no more an obstacle to the LLM than it was to the VCR (or the player piano, the photocopier, the personal computer, Internet or search engine).”

Other publishers, such as Associated Press, News Corp. and Vox Media, have concluded content sharing agreements with OpenAI, but the three litigants in this case are taking the opposite path: going on the offensive.

News organizations claim that not only is ChatGPT’s global success based in part on hoovering up quantities of copyrighted articles, but that ChatGPT is now effectively a competitor as a source of reliable information.

According to the complaint filed by THE TimesOpenAI is expected to pay billions of dollars in damages for illegally copying and using the newspaper’s archives. The lawsuit also calls for the destruction of ChatGPT’s dataset.

This would be a radical result. If the publishers win the lawsuit and a federal judge orders the dataset destroyed, it could completely upend the company, as it would force OpenAI to recreate its dataset based only on the works it has published. she was allowed to use.

Federal copyright law also provides for heavy financial penalties, with violators subject to fines of up to $150,000 for each “willfully committed” violation.

“If you copy millions of works, you can see how that becomes a potentially fatal number for a company,” Daniel Gervais, co-director of the intellectual property program at Vanderbilt University who studies generative AI, told NPR in August 2023when the Times was considering legal action against OpenAI before file a complaint in December. “Copyright law is a sword that will hang over the heads of AI companies for several years unless they figure out how to negotiate a solution.”