Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI-Generated Journalism
The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court for allegedly using their journalism to train AI models. The lawsuit accuses the tech companies of scraping material from the publications' websites without permission, including paywalled stories.
The publishers claim that OpenAI and Microsoft used the scraped materials in datasets that trained ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and the new AI-powered Bing. They can recite entire passages from copyrighted articles or closely mirror reporters' work.
The Seattle Times president and CEO Alan Fisco explained why the publication's leadership felt it necessary to take legal action against the tech giants: '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.'