WASHINGTON: The New York Times has sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Microsoft in a US court on Wednesday, alleging that the companies' powerful AI models used millions of articles for training its bots without permission.
Through their AI chatbots, the companies "seek to free-ride on The Times's massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment," the lawsuit said.
It accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of "using The Times's content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it."
The complaint cites several examples when a chatbot provided users with near-verbatim excerpts from Times articles that would otherwise require a paid subscription to view, the article went on to observe.
The suit does not include an exact monetary demand. But it says the defendants should be held responsible for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" related to the "unlawful copying and use of The Times's uniquely valuable works." It also calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times, The Times article on the lawsuit noted.
The suit follows a halt in negotiations involving The Times, Microsoft and OpenAI possibly over compensations and safeguards around the use of content.
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