OpenAI and Microsoft sued by The Times over AI copyrighted work

The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. This pens a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots.  

The copyright infringement lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, claims that while the companies copied information from many sources to build their systems, they give New York Times content “particular emphasis” and “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 “unlawful use” of the paper’s “copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more” to create artificial intelligence products “threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service”, the lawsuit claims. 

The lawsuit contains an appeal to the “vital” importance of the Times’s independent journalism to democracy, arguing that it is “increasingly rare and valuable”. 

The publisher’s lawsuit is the latest in a string of similar cases, including one brought by more than a dozen authors in September targeting the company for its use of their writing.