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.”

A group of 17 music publishers sued Twitter on Wednesday, accusing it of copyright infringement on about 1,700 songs, and seeking a whopping $250 million in damages, the latest headache for Elon Musk’s social media platform.

The publishers filed the lawsuit in Federal District Court in Nashville, saying Twitter violated copyright law by allowing users to post music to the platform without permission. Negotiations between Twitter and the music industry to establish broad licensing deals broke down months ago.

“Twitter stands alone as the largest social media platform that has completely refused to license the millions of songs on its service,” David Israelite, the president of the National Music Publishers’ Association, a trade group, said in a statement.

Twitter and Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit details what the publishers believe is Twitter’s failure to monitor rampant music copyright infringement on the service. It referenced specific tweets in which music has been used without permission, including a post about Rihanna’s song “Umbrella” containing what the suit claimed was two minutes of the song’s music video. The post had 221,000 views and 15,000 likes, the suit said, but not the permission of the song’s publishers.

The lawsuit sought punitive damages of up to $150,000 for each of the nearly 1,700 infringing works, for a total of approximately $250 million.

Music publishers represent songwriting and composition copyrights, which are separate from recording copyrights.

The lawsuit also documents the music publishers’ attempts to notify Twitter of infringement through the protocol outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law that protects Internet service providers when users post copyrighted material, but outlines a set of guidelines for how they can be taken down.

According to the lawsuit, the National Music Publishers’ Association has notified Twitter of approximately 300,000 tweets featuring infringing music since December 2021. The company routinely either deferred or failed to respond to these reports, the lawsuit said.

Twitter had been negotiating licensing rights with the three major music labels — Universal, Sony and Warner — since 2021, though talks stalled after Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the company in October. Music rights deals, which require social media companies to compensate publishers and record labels when users post or play content containing songs, can cost more than $100 million a year.

Since purchasing Twitter, Mr. Musk cut costs by laying off employees, skipping rent payments and avoiding bills to various vendors. Advertising revenues are down and the company faces billions of dollars in debt payments as a result of the acquisition of Mr. Musk. Mr Musk has said Twitter was headed for bankruptcy.

The suit tries to use Mr. Musk’s own words against him. It quoted a series of his tweets saying current copyright law “goes absurdly far beyond protecting the original creator”. He added“Overzealous DMCA is a plague on humanity.”