Digital media outlets are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement
Media outlets Raw Story, Alternet and The Intercept sued OpenAI on Wednesday for copyright infringement, adding to a growing chorus opposing the company’s methods of scraping content from the internet to support its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot to train.
The online publications sued OpenAI in two separate cases in a federal court in New York, saying ChatGPT’s creator trained its chatbot using journalists’ copyrighted works without properly crediting or citing them. The companies are seeking damages of at least $2,500 per violation, and asking OpenAI to remove all copyrighted articles from data training sets.
The Intercept also sued Microsoft, an OpenAI partner that developed its own chatbot called Bing using the same copyrighted information, according to the lawsuit.
“It’s time for news organizations to fight back against Big Tech’s continued attempts to monetize the work of others,” John Byrne, CEO and founder of Raw Story, which owns Alternet, said in a statement. “Big Tech has decimated journalism. It is time for publishers to take a stand.”
OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But OpenAI has done that in the past said that it wanted to work with publishers to ensure they too could benefit from AI and new revenue models. Microsoft said in September that it would cover legal costs when customers’ use of its AI products caused copyright issues and reiterated its commitments to authors’ protected works.
The Intercept also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuits follow The New York Times’ own lawsuit in December against OpenAI and Microsoft on similar grounds. On Monday, OpenAI filed a motion with the court to dismiss key elements of The Times’ lawsuit.
Generative AI has made waves in the past year, as new text and image generators have created increasingly realistic or human-like text, images, and video. But it also raises major concerns about the use of copyrighted works to train the AI algorithms, and its ability to mimic artistic performances.
The technology became a hot topic for actors and writers during union negotiations in Hollywood last year, and authors and others have sued the AI companies over their practices.
The three publications suing OpenAI on Wednesday are digital-only, raising the stakes, the media said in their lawsuits. They cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prevents the removal of information such as author and title from protected works.
“Raw Story’s copyrighted journalism is the result of significant efforts by human journalists who report the news,” Roxanne Cooper, publisher of Raw Story, said in a statement. “Rather than licensing that work, OpenAI ChatGPT has learned to ignore journalists’ copyrights and hide the use of copyrighted material.”