OpenAI, Microsoft sued by US newspapers over AI training

OpenAI and Microsoft have been hit with another lawsuit by the US newspapers alleging the violation of copyright rules over the artificial intelligence training.

The Seattle Times and Newsday sued the both tech companies in federal court, accusing them of using published news articles without permission for AI training.

The lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York alleges that these companies have been found complicit in scraping the newspapers’ websites, including content behind paywall and “incorporated articles into dataset used to train and operate products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features.”

The newspaper further alleged that using the AI models, these tech giants extract, reproduce and paraphrase passages from their originally published articles and answer the users’ queries. These blatant infringements not only harm web traffic but also reduce the need to buy subscriptions for news journalism.

Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees, according to the newspaper, "We feel strongly that we must defend our content - which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce - from being used without our consent or compensation,"

Against the backdrop of this lawsuit, OpenAI responded while clarifying that all of its AI models are being trained on publicly available data and based on fair use. However, a spokesperson did not specifically comment on the lawsuit.

A spokesperson for Microsoft, based near Seattle in Washington state, said in an email, "While we’re surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of local journalism and we’re always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type ​of dispute."

As per the suit, Newsday and The Seattle Times are seeking an order that could order “destruction of copies of their works as well as training datasets or AI models incorporating them.”

This is not the first time. Even in 2023 The New York Times also sued OpenAI and Microsoft for using millions of article copies to train AI models without their consent.