((Automated translation by Reuters, please see disclaimer https://bit.ly/rtrsauto)) by Blake Brittain
A group of newspapers, including the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, sued Microsoft MSFT.O and OpenAI in New York federal court on Tuesday, accusing them of misusing journalists’ labor to train their intelligence systems generative artificial.
The eight newspapers, which are owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group, claim in the complaint that the companies illegally copied millions of their articles to train artificial intelligence products, including Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The complaint follows similar lawsuits against Microsoft and OpenAI, which received billions of dollars in financial support from Microsoft, filed by The New York Times and media outlets The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet.
An OpenAI spokesperson said Tuesday that the company takes “great care in its products and design process to support news organizations.” A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on the complaint.
The newspapers’ cases are among several potential landmark lawsuits filed by copyright holders against tech companies over data used to train their generative AI systems.
A lawyer for MediaNews publications, Steven Lieberman, told Reuters that OpenAI owes its meteoric success to the works of others. The defendants know they have to pay for computers, chips and employee salaries, but they “think they can get away with taking content” without permission or payment, he said.
According to the lawsuit, Microsoft and OpenAI’s systems reproduce copyrighted newspaper content “word for word” when prompted to do so. ChatGPT also “hallucinates” articles attributed to newspapers that damage their reputations, including a fake Denver Post article touting smoking as a cure for asthma and a fake Chicago Tribune recommendation for a baby bouncer that was recalled after have been linked to child deaths.
The plaintiffs also include the Orlando Sentinel, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the San Jose Mercury News, the Orange County Register and the Twin Cities Pioneer Press. They asked the court for unspecified damages and an order prohibiting further offending.
