Why the New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft

Anyone who asks ChatGPT questions will receive prompt answers from the digital dialogue program. Where facts and information come from, the building blocks that the “machine” powered by artificial intelligence spits out, falls into the background.

A groundbreaking lawsuit, which was filed on December 27th in the Federal District Court in Manhattan (New York) and is the first of its kind, will now change this: The US newspaper “New York Times” (NYT) wants to take legal action against the company OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, as well as the company Microsoft, which has invested 13 billion US dollars in OpenAI and uses its technology, for example, for its in-house search engine “Bing”.

The reason: The NYT sees serious copyright infringement, as OpenAI and Microsoft are said to have used several million articles from the leading medium to feed ChatGPT and build a lucrative business, which in turn puts economic pressure on the original provider, the NYT. “Millions of New York Times articles were used to train chatbots (text-dialogue programs like ChatGPT, note) against which the NYT now has to compete,” the NYT quotes the lawsuit in an open article.

For example, if users ask chatbots about current news, they could generate answers based on past NYT articles. They are worried about losing their readership as well as data traffic and advertising revenue on www.nytimes.com.

A public NYT article said the indictment “does not contain a specific monetary demand.” However, the defendants are “held responsible” for damages estimated at several billion dollars. The use of the content should also be stopped and the collected data destroyed. Specifically, it can also be read that all chatbot models that work with protected NYT material must be destroyed.

The NYT also states that it contacted Microsoft and OpenAI in April to express its concerns about the use of their intellectual property and to work on a mutual solution, but the talks failed.

The NYT also wants to draw attention to a major discrepancy: While the newspaper is one of a few providers to have built a successful business model for online journalism, many print media are struggling with the migration of their readership to the Internet. At the same time, OpenAI and similar AI companies could easily use online texts of all kinds – from articles to poems to scripts – to train their chatbots, while also receiving large financial injections. OpenAI is now valued by investors at more than 80 billion US dollars.