Who are the plaintiffs this time?
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The newspapers involved in the suit are the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the Sun Sentinel in Florida, The Mercury News in California, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register in California and the Pioneer Press of Minnesota.
These publications are owned by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund.
What are their complaints?
In the suit, the news publishers have accused Microsoft and OpenAI of “purloining millions of the publishers’ copyrighted articles without permission and without payment” and using them to train large language models (LLM) that power chatbots such as ChatGPT and Copilot.
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They also said that the GenAI products incorrectly attribute inaccurate information to them.“The current GPT-4 LLM will output near-verbatim copies of significant portions of the publishers’ works when prompted to do so,” the complaint said.
How did Microsoft and OpenAI respond?
Though Microsoft has yet to comment, OpenAI said in a statement that the company takes great care in its products and design process to support news organisations.
“While we were not previously aware of Alden Global Capital’s concerns, we are actively engaged in constructive partnerships and conversations with many news organizations around the world to explore opportunities, discuss any concerns, and provide solutions,” OpenAI said.
It added that it sees ‘immense potential’ for AI tools like ChatGPT to deepen publishers’ relationships with readers and enhance the news experience.
What did the NYT suit say?
In December 2023, The New York Times filed a suit against the two companies, alleging that they trained their chatbots using copyrighted materials worth ‘billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” and that the bots then competed with the news outlet.
NYT said it was losing revenue because of AI tools which were diverting readers from its websites and even producing responses which were near verbatim excerpts from its articles. It produced evidence of prompts giving such responses to the Court.
OpenAI came down heavily on NYT, accusing it of “hacking” ChatGPT and making thousands of attempts to generate “the highly anomalous results”. “In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will,” it said.
The two defendants have sought to dismiss parts of the plea, arguing that ChatGPT “is not in any way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times”.
On the other hand, OpenAI recently signed content licensing agreements with publishers such as the Financial Times, and Politico and Business Insider parent Axel Springer . The Information reported that OpenAI offers $1-5 million to licence content.
Google recently signed a $60 million deal with Reddit to use its content to train AI models.
Do Indian news publishers have similar grievances?
Indian news publishers have sought changes to the Information Technology Rules to ensure fair compensation for the use of their content to train GenAI models.
Hindi publishers, including Dainik Bhaskar and Amar Ujala, under their terms for non-commercial use, have barred AI companies from using their digital content to train models without permission.
The Competition Commission of India is probing allegations by news organisations that search firm Google abuses its dominant position and imposes unfair compensation terms on publishers, affecting their revenue.
