OpenAI: owner of ChatGPT is sued by three websites – 02/29/2024 – Tech

Media outlets The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet sued OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT, for copyright infringement, on Wednesday (28).

In doing so, the companies join others challenging OpenAI’s methods of scraping content from the internet to train its AI-powered chatbot. The New York Times is another newspaper that is suing the technology company.

The online publications filed suit in New York federal court in two separate cases, alleging that ChatGPT’s creator trained his chatbot using journalists’ copyrighted works without properly crediting or citing them.

The companies are seeking damages worth at least US$2,500 (R$12,463) per violation, in addition to asking OpenAI to remove all copyrighted articles from the training datasets.

The Intercept also sued Microsoft, an OpenAI partner that developed its own chatbot called Bing with the same copyrighted information, according to the lawsuit.

“It’s time for news organizations to defend themselves against Big Tech’s continued attempts to profit from other people’s work,” John Byrne, CEO and founder of Raw Story, which owns AlterNet, said in a statement. “Big techs have devastated journalism. It’s time for publishers take a stand.”

OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in the past, OpenAI has said it wanted to work with publishers to ensure they too can benefit from AI and new revenue models.

In September 2023, Microsoft stated that it would cover legal costs when customers’ use of its AI products raised copyright concerns, and reiterated its commitment to authors’ protected works.

The Intercept also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuits follow The New York Times’ December lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for similar reasons. On Monday (26), OpenAI filed a request with the court to reject some of the main points of The New York Times’ lawsuit.

Generative AI has made an impact over the past year as new text and image generators create increasingly realistic or human-like text, images and videos. But it has also raised major concerns regarding the use of copyrighted works to train AI algorithms, as well as their ability to recreate artistic performances.

The technology became a major issue for actors and writers in Hollywood union negotiations last year, and authors and others have sued AI companies over their practices.

The three media outlets that sued OpenAI on Wednesday are exclusively digital. They cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prevents the removal of credit to the author and title of protected works.

“Raw Story’s copyrighted journalism is the result of significant efforts by human journalists reporting the news,” Raw Story editor Roxanne Cooper said in a statement. “Instead of licensing this work, OpenAI taught ChatGPT to ignore journalists’ copyrights and hide its use of copyrighted material.”