The lawsuit claims that “millions” of articles published by The New York Times were used without its permission to make ChatGPT smarter, claiming that the tool is now competing with the newspaper as a trusted source of information.
It claims that when asked about current events, ChatGPT sometimes generates “verbatim excerpts” of New York Times articles that are inaccessible without a paid subscription.
According to the lawsuit, this means readers don’t have to pay to get The New York Times content, which means it is losing subscription revenue and ad clicks from people visiting the site.
It also gives the example of the Bing search engine – which has some features powered by ChatGPT – producing results taken from The New York Times-owned sites, without linking to articles or including the referral links it uses to generate revenue.
Microsoft has invested more than $10bn (£7.8bn) in OpenAI.
The New York Times unsuccessfully approached Microsoft and OpenAI in April seeking an “amicable resolution” to its copyright issues, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Manhattan federal court.
multiple lawsuits
A month ago, OpenAI went through a tumultuous period when co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was fired and then rehired within days.
His dismissal shocked those in the industry and led to employees threatening mass resignations unless he was reinstated.
But in addition to its internal issues, the company is currently facing multiple lawsuits filed in 2023.
In September, a group of US writers including Game of Thrones novelists George R.R. Martin and John Grisham filed a similar copyright infringement lawsuit.
It comes after comedian Sarah Silverman filed legal action in July, and writers Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman signed a letter the same month An open letter calling on artificial intelligence companies to compensate them for the use of their work.
OpenAI is also facing a lawsuit along with Microsoft and programming website GitHub from a group of computing experts who argue that their code was used to train an artificial intelligence called Copilot without their permission.
In addition to these actions, there are numerous cases against developers of so-called generative artificial intelligence (that is, artificial intelligence that can create media based on text prompts), with artists suing text-to-image generators Stability AI and Midjourney in January, claiming they only Training on copyrighted artwork can make a difference.