Insider Brief

• Eight U.S. newspaper publishers have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI in a New York federal court, CNBC is reporting.
• The company behind the newspapers say these AI services have reused their articles without permission in generative artificial intelligence (AI) products.
• The newspapers are under the ownership of Alden Global Capital.

Eight U.S. newspaper publishers have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI in a New York federal court, alleging that the tech giants have reused their articles without permission in generative artificial intelligence (AI) products, and that these products have attributed inaccurate information to the newspapers, CNBC reports.

The complaint focuses on Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, asserting that these products have “purloined millions of the publishers’ copyrighted articles without permission and without payment.” Copilot is available across Microsoft’s software ecosystem, including the Windows operating system and the Bing search engine.

The lawsuit was filed by publishers that include the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Sun Sentinel, The Mercury News, The Denver Post, Orange County Register, and Pioneer Press. These newspapers fall under the ownership of Alden Global Capital.

“We take great care in our products and design process to support news organizations,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in response to the lawsuit, as reported by the financial news network, adding that the company is “actively engaged in constructive partnerships and conversations” with news organizations worldwide to explore opportunities and address concerns.

The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI used data sets containing text from these newspapers to train its GPT-2 and GPT-3 models, and that its latest GPT-4 model can produce “near-verbatim copies” of the publishers’ works, according to CNBC. It also criticizes Microsoft’s Copilot for relying on content from these newspapers without always providing links back to their websites, potentially harming subscription and ad revenues, the network reports.

This legal challenge follows a similar lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI earlier this year, alleging copyright infringement by ChatGPT. CNBC reports that OpenAI has since stated its intention to support “a healthy news ecosystem,” and has engaged in content-sharing agreements with media companies such as Axel Springer and the Financial Times.