NEW YORK CITY: In a federal court on Tuesday, a consortium of newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News, sued Microsoft and OpenAI, claiming that the companies were exploiting the labor of reporters to train their generative AI systems.
The eight newspapers, which are part of MediaNews Group, a hedge fund owned by Alden Global Capital, said in the lawsuit that the businesses had illegally copied millions of their stories in order to train AI products, such as Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The action comes after similar continuing litigation filed by the New York Times, Raw Story, AlterNet, and The Intercept against Microsoft and OpenAI, which has been financially supported by Microsoft to the tune of billions of dollars.
“Great care in our products and design process to support news organizations,” according to an OpenAI spokeswoman, is something the firm does.
Copyright owners have filed multiple potentially historic lawsuits against internet corporations over the data used to train their generative AI systems, including the newspaper cases.
Steven Lieberman, an attorney for MediaNews magazines, claimed that OpenAI’s meteoric rise to fame was due to the contributions of others. According to him, the defendants “think somehow they can get away with taking content” without authorization or payment, even though they are aware that they must pay for computers, chips, and employee salaries.
The lawsuit claimed that when asked, Microsoft and OpenAI’s computers “verbatim” replicate the newspapers’ copyrighted content. According to the report, ChatGPT also “hallucinates” stories that are linked to negative press for the newspapers. Examples of these include a phony suggestion for an infant lounger that was recalled after being connected to child fatalities and a phony Denver Post piece endorsing smoking as a treatment for asthma.
The Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register, and Twin Cities Pioneer Press are among the other plaintiffs.
