Eight leading newspapers, including the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and financially backed by Microsoft, has been using copyrighted articles from these newspapers to train itself without seeking permission or making any payment.
The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT has copied stories from the newspapers without restraint, using millions of articles to respond to user queries. This has led to ChatGPT becoming a direct competitor to the newspapers at a time when the news industry is grappling with declining advertising and subscription revenues.
The lawsuit also alleges that ChatGPT has been falsely attributing reporting to the newspapers in its generated responses, thereby tarnishing the reputation of these news outlets. For instance, ChatGPT has been accused of stating that the Chicago Tribune recommended an infant lounger that the paper never endorsed and which had been linked to infant deaths and recalled. In another instance, ChatGPT was asked if smoking cures asthma and it fabricated that The Denver Post published research indicating that smoking can be a cure for asthma, which is obviously false.
The newspapers, all owned by the New York hedge fund Alden Global Capital, are seeking unspecified monetary damages and an end to the practice of using their copyrighted work. They are also asking for the destruction of any AI models used by OpenAI that incorporate works published by the newspapers, a task that AI experts have said would be nearly impossible to accomplish without completely rebuilding the models, a costly and time-consuming endeavor.
In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI stated that it takes great care to support news organizations in building its products and sees immense potential for AI tools like ChatGPT to deepen publishers’ relationships with readers and enhance the news experience. Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest financial backer, did not respond to a request for comment.
Read more at: www.npr.org