The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement. The New York Times claims groundbreaking generative AI such as ChatGPT, Copilot and other chatbots developed by OpenAI and Microsoft breach copyright laws. This case is the first significant lawsuit challenging AI and the use of materials available on the internet.

The importance of the New York Times suing OpenAI and Microsoft

This case is critical because of the impact its ruling could have on the future development and use of generative AI. This case would also establish the precedent for how to handle intellectual property in the context of generative AI. This issue has been a growing concern for content creators across the board.

Context for  the court case

Companies train AI models, like the ones used to build ChatGPT and Copilot, on vast datasets. These datasets comprise, among other sources, the data or information available online. Generative AI creators use web scraping to gather data, including content from organisations like the New York Times. This practice results in the free utilisation of content created and funded by the New York Times. Ultimately, this alleged misuse of copyrighted data is the basis for the New York Times’ multi-billion-dollar claim.

The New York Times claimed that OpenAI and Microsoft, as creators of highly profitable generative AI models, did not give credit or remuneration to the New York Times despite relying on their works. The New York Times further alleges that this conduct not only infringes on their intellectual property rights but could also threaten their business model of providing news coverage, analysis and commentary on current events.

The impact of New York Times suing OpenAI and Microsoft

While we won’t know the outcome of this case for quite some time, its impact is already being seen.

  1. It has raised ethical, legal and practical questions about the role of original content creators in the generative AI ecosystem. Among these questions is whether generative AI will eliminate the need for content creators, and how creators will prove their original authorship. Copyright serves as a protective mechanism, automatically applying once a work is created. Unlike patents or trademarks, there is no registration process. The effect is that there’s no objective way to verify the work’s original creator and owner. But even if there was, no universally recognised IP body keeps track of all intellectual property and its owners.
  2. If the New York Times is successful, OpenAI and Microsoft will have to scrub all of the New York Times content from their models. The impact will not only be a resource-intensive exercise for OpenAI and Microsoft but also create gaps and limits to the information available on their generative AI platforms. In turn, these effects could negatively impact the quality of the product offering, and the further development of generative AI models will either not have sufficient content from which to generate a response or the generated content will be somewhat deficient without including specific sources in the AI models.
  3. If the federal court finds that OpenAI and Microsoft have infringed copyright and intellectual property laws, it could open the floodgates for claims against developers of generative AI. We have already started seeing other lawsuits, such as the Authors Guild’s class action, filed on similar grounds.

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