New York Times files multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI

New York Times has filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is powered by Microsoft’s technology, has infringed on the New York Times' copyright. The New York Times claims that millions of its articles were used without permission to train ChatGPT, which now competes with the newspaper as a trustworthy information source. The lawsuit also claims that ChatGPT sometimes generates “verbatim excerpts” from New York Times articles, which can only be accessed with a paid subscription. This means that readers can access New York Times content without paying for it, resulting in the loss of subscription revenue and advertising clicks for the newspaper. The lawsuit also mentions the Bing search engine, which uses features powered by ChatGPT, displaying results taken from New York Times-owned websites without proper attribution or referral links. Microsoft has invested over $10 billion in OpenAI. The lawsuit was filed after unsuccessful attempts by the New York Times to resolve the copyright issue amicably with Microsoft and OpenAI in April. OpenAI has recently faced internal issues, including the sacking and rehiring of its co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. The company is also facing multiple lawsuits, including a copyright infringement case brought by authors Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman. OpenAI and Microsoft are facing another lawsuit alongside programming site GitHub from a group of computing experts who claim that their code was used without permission to train an AI called Copilot. There have also been lawsuits against developers of generative AI, with artists suing text-to-image generators Stability AI and Midjourney for allegedly using copyrighted artwork. None of these lawsuits have been resolved yet.