Three News Outlets Sue OpenAI And Microsoft Alleging Copyright Infringement

Three news outlets added their names to the growing list of organizations and individuals suing AI firms over copyright infringement Wednesday.

AlterNet, The Intercept and Raw Story filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Southern District of New York. The filings allege that the companies infringed on the copyright of their work by having their content used to train AI models built and utilized by the companies without consent.

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s flagship large language model program, is at the center of the allegations. The complaints state that “At least some of the time, ChatGPT provides or has provided responses to users that regurgitate verbatim or nearly verbatim copyright-protected works of journalism without providing author, title, copyright, or terms of use information contained in those works.”

“ChatGPT does not have any independent knowledge of the information provided in its responses,” it continues. “Rather, to service Defendants’ paying customers, ChatGPT instead repackages, among other material, the copyrighted journalism work product developed by Plaintiff and others at their expense.”

The filings allege that both OpenAI and Microsoft “had reason to know that use of copyrighted material in their training sets is copyright infringement” due to the creation of opt-out tools that allowed websites to block ChatGPT training sets from utilizing their content.

While OpenAI’s ties to ChatGPT are obvious, Microsoft is included as a defendant based on its heavy investment in OpenAI and the company’s support practices aiding in further development of the generative AI program. According to the complaint, Microsoft “provides the data center and supercomputing infrastructure used to train ChatGPT” and “hosts ChatGPT training sets and provides access to those training sets” to OpenAI.

According to The Verge, AlterNet and Raw Story’s suits make further allegations, accusing both organizations of having “reason to know that ChatGPT would be less popular and generate less revenue if users believed that ChatGPT responses violated third-party copyrights.”

These new lawsuits join the collection of lawsuits filed against AI companies over copyright infringement in the last year. The New York Times is currently in litigation with OpenAI and Microsoft over similar claims, as is a collection of authors headlined by Game Of Thrones creator Geroge R.R. Martin. Getty Images and Universal Music Group have filed suits against AI developers Stability AI and Anthropic respectfully.

OpenAI is currently petitioning that The New York Times lawsuit be thrown out, alleging that the news outlet paid an unnamed individual to “hack” ChatGPT in order to generate evidence that the AI developer believes is misleading. “What OpenAI bizarrely mischaracterizes as ‘hacking’ is simply using OpenAI’s products to look for evidence that they stole and reproduced The Times’s copyrighted work,” Ian Crosby, the news outlet’s attorney, told Reuters in a statement Tuesday.