OpenAI wants to dismiss parts of The New York Times lawsuit
OpenAI submitted a motion Monday in federal court seeking to dismiss several key elements of a lawsuit filed by The New York Times Company.
The times indicted OpenAI and its partner Microsoft accused them on December 27 of copyright infringement by using millions of their articles to train AI technologies such as the online chatbot ChatGPT. Chatbots now compete with the news media as a source of reliable information, the lawsuit said.
In the motion filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the defendants argue that ChatGPT “is in no way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times.”
“In the real world, people don’t use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product for that purpose,” the filing said. ‘They couldn’t do that either. Normally you can’t use ChatGPT to serve Times articles at will.”
Representatives for OpenAI and the Times Company did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The motion asked the court to dismiss four claims in The Times’ complaint to narrow the focus of the lawsuit. OpenAI’s lawyers argued that The Times should not be allowed to sue for acts of reproduction that occurred more than three years ago and that the newspaper’s claim that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an amendment to U.S. copyright law that was passed in 1998 adopted after the rise of the Internet, was not legally justified.
The Times was the first major US media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Novelists, computer programmers and other groups have also filed copyright lawsuits against the startup and other companies building generative AI, technologies that generate text, images and other media from short prompts.
Like other AI companies, OpenAI has built its technology by providing vast amounts of digital data, some of which is likely copyrighted. AI companies have claimed that they can legally use such material to train their systems without paying for it because it is public and they are not reproducing the material in its entirety.
In its lawsuit, The Times included examples of OpenAI’s technology reproducing excerpts from its articles almost verbatim. In the motion to dismiss, lawyers for OpenAI accused The Times of paying someone to hack their chatbot. “It took them tens of thousands of attempts to get the very different results,” the motion said.
“They were only able to do this by targeting and exploiting a bug (which OpenAI has committed to addressing) using misleading prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use,” the filing said.
The filing also argued that it was legal to use copyrighted material in its systems, citing legal precedents that allow the use of copyrighted content “in creating new, different and innovative products.”
“OpenAI and the other defendants in these lawsuits will ultimately prevail because no one — not even The New York Times — is allowed to monopolize the facts or the rules of language,” the complaint said.