OpenAI and Microsoft Sued Over Alleged Copyright Infringement on AI Training Data

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a federal lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that their AI systems infringed on the newspapers' copyrights. The suit claims that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped articles from the newspapers' websites, including content behind paywalls, to train their AI products such as ChatGPT and Bing's AI features.

The newspapers argue that the companies' AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles, and provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions. They are seeking an order requiring the destruction of copies of their works as well as training datasets or AI models incorporating them.

In a statement, Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote that the newspapers feel 'strongly that we must defend our content - which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce - from being used without our consent or compensation.'

A spokesperson for OpenAI said its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, while Microsoft expressed surprise at the lawsuit but acknowledged the importance of local journalism.