ChatGPT: New York Times may sue OpenAI, says radio – 08/19/2023 – Tech

The New York Times is studying ways to protect its intellectual property from artificial intelligence companies, which use data available on the internet to develop the technology. Lawyers for the North American newspaper are even considering going to court against the creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI. The information was released by US public radio, NPR, on Wednesday (16).

The NYT and OpenAI have been negotiating a form of payment for weeks to guarantee the legal use of the newspaper’s articles in training AIs. As the discussions did not advance, the press vehicle began to consider the judicial route.

NPR heard from people close to the case, who asked to remain anonymous. The New York Times declined to respond to the radio, but company executives have been dropping hints that confirm tension with OpenAI.

The process of scraping internet data, essential for the development of artificial intelligence, is done by companies in the area without any permission. In the United States, there is still no definition if this procedure is legal.

The intellectual property policy for training AIs varies from country to country, according to InternetLab’s culture and knowledge coordinator, Alice Lana.

“United States, Japan and Singapore and some countries of the European Union have already made legislative changes that allow data and text mining to take place in databases, without violating copyright”, says Lana. The idea is that the content was not used by a person but processed by machines.

This ensures legal certainty in the development of generative artificial intelligence, although in the US the exception to intellectual property law is valid only for research.

In the competition for reader attention on the internet, ChatGPT could become a direct competitor to the New York Times, as it delivers answers to public queries. The AI ​​does this, indirectly, with material produced and published by the newspaper.

This process is even more pronounced when search engines like Google and Microsoft’s Bing, which concentrate much of the internet’s traffic, use text-generating AI to deliver answers on the website itself — without redirecting to the source.

If a judge finds that OpenAI has violated the newspaper’s copyright, the court can order the destruction of ChatGPT. That would make OpenAI have to create a new artificial intelligence with only authorized data. The American law mentions a fine of up to BRL 150,000 for each intentional violation.

The conversations between the New York Times and OpenAI come after the news that the newspaper would not participate in a group of news outlets united to negotiate with the big technology companies conditions for the use of news content of private property. The initiative is led by Fox founder Barry Diller.

In June, NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien told the Cannes Film Festival that it was time for technology companies to pay fair value for access to the newspaper archive.