OpenAI says the lawsuit against the New York Times is “without merit.”

OpenAI said Monday that a lawsuit against the New York Times was “baseless” and that it supported news organizations and created opportunities as it waded further into a debate over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.

The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on December 27, accusing the companies of copyright infringement by using millions of articles to train AI technologies such as the ChatGPT chatbot. Chatbots now compete with The Times as a source of reliable information, the lawsuit says.

In a 1,000-word blog post on Monday, OpenAI said it was working with news organizations and had formed partnerships with some of them, including The Associated Press. Using copyrighted works to train its technologies is fair use under the law, the company added. The Times’ lawsuit does not tell the full story of how OpenAI and its technologies work, the report said.

“We look forward to continuing to collaborate with news organizations and help advance their ability to produce quality journalism by realizing the transformative potential of AI,” the company wrote.

Lindsey Held, a spokeswoman for OpenAI, declined further comment.

The Times was the first major U.S. media organization to sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright issues related to its written works. Other groups, including novelists and computer programmers, have also filed copyright lawsuits against AI companies. The suits have been fueled by the rise of “generative AI,” technologies that generate text, images and other media based on short prompts.

OpenAI and other AI companies are building this technology by feeding it vast amounts of digital data, some of which is likely copyrighted. That has led to the realization that online information – stories, works of art, news articles, message board posts and photographs – can have significant untapped value.

AI companies have long argued that they can legally use such content to train their technologies without paying for it because the material is public and they are not reproducing the material in its entirety.

In its blog post, OpenAI said discussions with The Times about a potential partnership appeared to be constructive, with a final announcement on December 19. During the negotiations, The Times said it had seen OpenAI’s technology “regurgitate” some of its content – meaning the technology had generated near-verbatim excerpts from articles appearing in The Times – but declined to provide examples. When The Times filed suit eight days later, OpenAI said it was surprised and disappointed.

The Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

OpenAI said its technology sometimes regurgitates articles, but that it was a “rare bug” it was trying to fix. The Times’ lawsuit included examples showing that ChatGPT reproduced excerpts from its articles almost word for word.

“Intentionally manipulating our models to cause outbreaks is not an appropriate use of our technology and violates our terms of use,” OpenAI said.