Newspapers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Content Scraping
The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft over allegations that they scraped content from the newspapers' websites to train their AI systems.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims that the companies used articles behind paywalls and incorporated them into datasets used to train and operate AI products like ChatGPT and Copilot.
The newspapers argue that the AI systems can reproduce passages from their reporting and closely paraphrase articles, reducing the need for users to visit their websites or purchase subscriptions.
Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco stated that the newspaper spends millions of dollars annually producing its journalism and needs to protect that content from being used without consent or compensation.