New York Times sues Microsoft and OpenAI for using its stories to train chatbots

The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against the developer of ChatGPT and Microsoft in a bid to end the process of using news stories to train online chatbots.

According to the lawsuit, the companies are threatening its livelihood by effectively stealing billions of dollars worth of work by its journalists.

In some cases, artificial intelligence (AI) programmes such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, spew the Times' material verbatim to people seeking answers online.

Web traffic is an important component of the newspaper's advertising revenue and helps drive subscriptions to its online site.

But the output of AI chatbots is diverting that traffic away from news outlets and other copyright holders, the Times says, making it less likely that people will visit the original source for the information.

Consequently, the paper filed its lawsuit in a Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, after what appears to be a breakdown in talks with Microsoft and OpenAI, which began in April.

"These bots compete with the content they are trained on," said Ian B. Crosby, partner and lead counsel at Susman Godfrey, which is representing The Times.

An OpenAI spokesperson said in a prepared statement that the company respects the rights of content creators and is "committed" to working with them to help them benefit from the technology and new revenue models.

"Our ongoing conversations with the New York Times have been productive and moving forward constructively, so we are surprised and disappointed with this development," the spokesperson said.

"We're hopeful that we will find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we are doing with many other publishers."

Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment from the Associated Press.

AI companies scrape information available online, including articles published by news organisations, to train generative AI chatbots.

The large language models are also trained on a huge trove of other human-written materials, which helps them to build a strong command of language and grammar, and to answer questions correctly.

But the technology is still under development and is culpable of mistakes. In its lawsuit, for example, the Times said OpenAI's GPT-4 falsely attributed product recommendations to Wirecutter, the paper's product reviews site, endangering its reputation.

OpenAI and other AI companies, including rival Anthropic, have attracted billions of dollars in investments since public and business interest in the technology exploded.

Microsoft has a partnership with OpenAI that allows it to capitalise on the company's AI technology.

The tech giant is also OpenAI's biggest backer and has invested at least $13 billion (£10.1 billion) into the company since the two began their partnership in 2019, according to the lawsuit.

As part of the agreement, Microsoft's supercomputers help power OpenAI's AI research, and the tech giant integrates the startup's technology into its products.

The New York Times' complaint comes as the number of lawsuits filed against OpenAI for copyright infringement continue to grow.

Several writers - including comedian Sarah Silverman - have sued the company, claiming their books were ingested to train OpenAI's AI models without permission.

In June, more than 4,000 writers signed a letter to the CEOs of OpenAI and other tech companies accusing them of exploitative practices in building chatbots.

Meanwhile, the use of AI technology has also fuelled strikes by actors and writers in Hollywood.

The Times did not list specific damages that it is seeking, but said the legal action "seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe" for copying and using its work.

The paper is also asking the court to order the tech companies to destroy AI models or data sets that incorporate its work.

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