US Newspapers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Alleged AI Training Data Scrape
US tech giants OpenAI and Microsoft have been sued by two American newspapers for alleged copyright infringement. The Seattle Times and Newsday claim that the companies scraped their websites, including content behind paywalls, to train AI systems such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing's AI features.
The suit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft copied articles from the newspapers' websites without permission, incorporating them into datasets used to train their AI products. The Seattle Times and Newsday say this has resulted in the reproduction of passages from their reporting, close paraphrasing of articles, and provision of answers that reduce the need for users to visit their websites or buy subscriptions.
The newspapers are seeking an order requiring the destruction of copies of their works as well as training datasets or AI models incorporating them. This is not the first case against OpenAI and Microsoft - a similar lawsuit was filed by The New York Times in 2023, which accused the companies of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI's popular chatbot.
OpenAI spokespersons said their models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use. Microsoft stated that while they were surprised by the lawsuit, they appreciate the importance of local journalism and are willing to explore solutions with the newspapers.