The “New York Times” sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement | Technology

The newspaper The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging that those companies’ artificial intelligence technology illegally copied millions of articles to form ChatGPT and other news services that now compete with the original content of the newspaper.

The complaint, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, New York, is the latest in a series of lawsuits aimed at limiting the allegations scraping (projection) large swathes of content from across the Internet – without any compensation to authors or publishing companies – to train so-called “big language” artificial intelligence models. Actors, writers, journalists and other creators who publish their works on the Internet fear that AI will profit from their original content and serve up chatbots and other competing news sources without compensation due to the source.

But the demand for Times This is of singular importance because it is the first from a major American media outlet against OpenAI and Microsoft, the most recognized AI brands. This complaint is reminiscent of those which constituted the long trial that the media around the world supported against Facebook and Google for having reproduced content without compensating the publishing houses, and which Australia legislated with an initiative pioneer.

On demand, keeps the diary“the illegal use of the labor of The temperature by Microsoft and OpenAI to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens the newspaper’s ability to provide this service. The newspaper explains that OpenAI and Microsoft used other sources in their “large-scale copying”, but “placed particular emphasis on the content of the Times” seeking to “profit from the Times’ enormous investment in its journalism, using it to create substitute products without permission or payment.”

The New York newspaper is one of a number of major US media outlets, including CNN, which earlier this year added code to their websites to block OpenAI’s web crawler, GPTBot, and prevent it from analyze the content of their platforms.

The company discovered a few months ago that its work had been used to evolve large language models of AI companies. In April, it began negotiating with OpenAI and Microsoft over fair compensation and how to define the terms of an agreement. But, unable to come to an agreement between the two technologies, he opted for the legal route. Microsoft and OpenAI claim that disclosing content from Times falls within the bounds of “fair or legitimate use”, since, whether or not it is copyrighted material, what they are pursuing is a “transformative purpose”.

But, explains the text of the lawsuit, “there is nothing transformative in the use of the content of The temperature without paying to create products that replace The temperature and steal their audience,” a sort of free information substitute. “Because the results of defendants’ GenAI models rival and closely imitate the content used to train them, copying the Times’ work for this purpose does not constitute fair use.”

AI tools can “generate results that recite the content of the Times They faithfully summarize it and imitate its expressive style, as demonstrated by dozens of examples. These tools also falsely attribute false information to the Times“, says the complaint. In other words, hacking by AI tools not only deprives the newspaper of revenue from subscriptions, licenses, advertising and affiliations, the lawsuit points out, but it also creates a worrying swamp of misinformation. Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which was updated earlier this year with OpenAI technology, often “copies and categorizes” log content to produce longer, more detailed answers than traditional search engines, recalls Requirement.

The Executive Vice President and General Counsel of The New York Times, Diane Brayton, informed employees of the legal action this morning, ensuring that the company “recognizes the potential (of generative AI) for the public and for journalism”. “But, at the same time, we believe that the success of GenAI and the companies developing it should not come at the expense of journalistic institutions,” according to Brayton’s message to staff, which CNN had access to. “Use of our work to create GenAI tools must be accompanied by authorization and agreement that reflects the fair value of that work, as established by law.”

Microsoft and OpenAI have not yet commented on the complaint.

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