OpenAI and Microsoft face a lawsuit from The New York Times for alleged copyright infringement
December 27 2023
The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies have infringed on the Times’ copyright by using their large language models, including ChatGPT and Copilot, to produce outputs that replicate or closely summarize the Times’ content. The media outlet argues that this not only damages its relationship with readers but also impacts potential revenue from subscriptions, licensing, advertising, and affiliate partnerships. The lawsuit claims that despite attempts at negotiation, no fair compensation agreement was reached, and now the Times is seeking billions in damages for the unauthorized use of its journalistic content. The New York Times has also blocked OpenAI’s web crawlers from accessing its site to train their AI models.
Back to Breaking AI News
What does it mean?
- Large language models: Types of artificial intelligence models that are designed to understand, generate, and manipulate human language. They are trained on vast amounts of text and are capable of completing tasks like translation, summarization, and question-answering.
- ChatGPT: A specific AI language model developed by OpenAI, which interacts with users in a conversational way and is able to produce human-like text based on its training data.
- Copilot: An AI-powered coding assistant that suggests lines of code or functions to programmers as they write code. It can be seen as a tool that helps write software by predicting the next segments of code, trained usually on a large corpus of publicly available code.
- Copyright: A legal concept that grants the creator of original work exclusive rights to its use and distribution, usually for a limited time, with the intention of enabling the creator to receive compensation for their intellectual investment.
- Subscriptions: A business model that involves customers paying a recurring price at regular intervals to access a product or service.
- Licensing: The granting of permission to use intellectual property rights, such as copyrights, in exchange for an agreed payment (often a fee or royalty).
- Advertising: A means of communication with the users of a product or service, typically paid for by sponsors and delivered through various media, aiming to inform or entice consumers.
- Affiliate partnerships: An arrangement in which one party (the affiliate) advertises a product or service for another party (the advertiser) in exchange for a commission on sales or leads generated through the affiliate's promotional efforts.
- Web crawlers: Automated programs that index the content of websites by visiting and reading pages, typically used by search engines to collect information and create search indexes.