AI expert Marva Baylor explains the issues in Sarah Silverman and others’ lawsuit against OpenAI
A group of newspapers, including the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune, sued Microsoft and OpenAI in New York federal court on Tuesday, accusing them of misusing reporters’ work to train their generative artificial intelligence systems.
The eight newspapers owned by MediaNews Group, part of investment firm Alden Global Capital, allege in the lawsuit that the companies have used millions of newspapers to train AI products such as Microsoft’s CoPilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. He said he had illegally copied the article.
The complaint follows similar ongoing lawsuits filed by The New York Times and news organizations The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet against Microsoft and OpenAI, which receives billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft. This follows.
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OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is facing a lawsuit over its use of copyrighted content in training models. (Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images/Getty Images)
An OpenAI spokesperson said Tuesday that the company is “paying close attention to our products and design processes to support news organizations.” A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on the complaint.
The newspaper lawsuit is one of several landmark lawsuits brought by copyright holders against technology companies over data used to train generative AI systems.
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ChatGPT is a generative AI tool that responds to user prompts after being trained on large amounts of data. ((Photo Credit: Jaap Arrians/NurPhoto via Getty Images) / Getty Images)
Steven Lieberman, a lawyer for MediaNews publications, told Reuters that OpenAI owed much of its huge success to others. He said the defendants know they have to pay for the computers, chips and employees, but “they think they can get away with it by taking the content” without permission or payment.
According to the complaint, Microsoft and OpenAI’s systems reproduce the newspaper’s copyrighted content “as is” upon request. According to the paper, ChatGPT has also been linked to newspaper articles, including a fake Denver Post article promoting smoking as a cure for asthma and a fake Chicago Tribune endorsement of a toddler lounger being recalled in connection with a child death. It is said that he is “hallucinating” articles that damage his reputation.
ChatGPT was released in late 2022 and helped drive public interest in AI tools. ((Photo credit: Silas Stein/picture Alliance via Getty Images) / Getty Images)
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Plaintiffs also include the Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and Twin Cities Pioneer Press. They asked the court for unspecified monetary damages and an order preventing further infringement.
