Group with almost 400 newspapers sues OpenAI and Microsoft in the USA for copying texts without authorization

A group of publishers representing almost 400 newspapers filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the United States, accusing big techs of using content without authorization to train artificial intelligence models, Bloomberg news agency reported.

In the lawsuit, filed on June 24 in a New York court, the media companies claim that chatbots such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot generated billions of dollars in market value for their companies using the work of newspapers, who did not receive any payment for it.

According to the newspapers, OpenAI and Microsoft systematically and unauthorizedly copied original content from newspaper websites to train their AI models. “Unless companies developing AI products are held accountable for the misuse of publishers’ content, the AI ​​boom will be the death knell for local journalism.”

The companies say in the lawsuit that, even though they spent billions of dollars to protect newspapers’ copyrights, they were unable to prevent the material from being copied. The publishers seek statutory damages and injunctive relief for copyright infringement.

In a statement sent to Bloomberg, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company’s models “drive innovation, are trained with publicly available data, and are founded on fair use.” Microsoft did not immediately respond to the agency’s request.

Microsoft did not respond.

The action joins a list of at least 115 disputes between journalistic outlets, writers and artists against companies specializing in AI, mapped by the “ChatGPT is eating the world” platform.

American AI companies deny the allegations in hundreds of ongoing lawsuits. They argue in court that the use of reports and books to develop chatbots is “fair use”, when there is no need to pay; they argue that robots do not reproduce the content of works, but rather deliver something transformed, as a human would do. They also call for a more comprehensive reading of copyright, which does not slow down innovation in the sector.