The New York Times announced today (Wednesday) that it is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement. This lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, is the first of its kind and could have some major implications that could affect the use of published work in the training of AI technologies. 
As The Times themselves wrote in an article published this morning ET, they are “the first major American media organization to sue the companies […] over copyright issues associated with its written works.”
The lawsuit itself states that OpenAI and Microsoft’s  Large Language Models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT and CoPilot respectively “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style.”
The New York Times alleges that this “undermine[s] and damage[s]” their relationship with their readers and deprives them of “subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue.”
But it’s not just that. In the news article by The New York Times, they wrote that the lawsuit “contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.”
“Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as “Copilot”) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment,” the lawsuit writes.
The overarching argument is that these AI models “threaten high-quality journalism” by depriving news outlets of their ability to protect and monetize their content. 
The lawsuit further states that the AI models trained on The Times’ content have been “extremely lucrative” for Microsoft and OpenAI. 
While the suit does not specify an exact monetary demand, it does say that the defendants should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.” It also calls for the destruction of any chatbots and training data using The Times’ copyrighted material. 
As The Times reported, they are not the first. “The actress Sarah Silverman joined a pair of lawsuits in July that accused Meta and OpenAI of having “ingested” her memoir as a training text for A.I. programs. Novelists expressed alarm when it was revealed that A.I. systems had absorbed tens of thousands of books, leading to a lawsuit by authors including Jonathan Franzen and John Grisham. Getty Images, the photography syndicate, sued one A.I. company that generates images based on written prompts, saying the platform relies on unauthorized use of Getty’s copyrighted visual materials.”
The complaint filed by The New York Times also claims that the company had approached Microsoft and OpenAI back in April to negotiate about the use of The Times’ intellectual property. The Times claims they were unable to reach a resolution. 
As of the time of writing this episode (Wednesday evening), neither Microsoft nor OpenAI have issued any official statements regarding the lawsuit and have not responded to any of the requests for comment from various news outlets. The defendants so far haven’t had an opportunity to respond in court.