Newspapers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI-Generated Content

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over allegations that the tech giants used their journalism to train artificial intelligence systems without permission.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims that the companies scraped content from the newspapers' websites, including articles behind paywalls, and incorporated it into datasets used to train AI products such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot.

The Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco said that the newspaper spends millions of dollars annually producing its journalism and needs to protect that content from being used without consent or compensation.

OpenAI has stated that its models are trained on publicly available data, but did not comment specifically on the lawsuit. Microsoft expressed surprise at the legal action, saying it recognizes the importance of local journalism and is willing to discuss potential solutions.