Publishers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Paywalled Article Scraping

OpenAI and Microsoft are facing another lawsuit over their use of paywalled articles to train AI models. The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, alleging that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped paywalled content without permission.

The companies' chatbots were able to reproduce entire passages and closely paraphrase reporters' work, according to the publishers.

Seattle Times president and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees that 'we 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.'

OpenAI said it only uses publicly available materials grounded in fair use for model training, while Microsoft expressed surprise at the lawsuit and willingness to explore solutions with the publishers.