2023. December 27 – 19:11
The New York Times filed a lawsuit against the owner of ChatGPT, because according to the newspaper, OpenAI violated its copyright. A lawsuit was also filed against Microsoft, demanding billions of dollars in damages.
ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) learn by analyzing massive amounts of data, often from the Internet. According to the plaintiff, millions of articles published by the New York Times were used without permission to make ChatGPT smarter, and now it is a competitor to the newspaper.
According to the New York Times, when ChatGPT is asked about current events, it sometimes quotes verbatim articles from the New York Times that you won't be able to access without a subscription. This way, readers get The New York Times' content without paying for it — and the newspaper loses from subscription revenue, as well as from site visitors' clicks, i.e., from advertising revenue.
According to the New York Times, the search engine Bing — some of whose functionality is powered by ChatGPT — returns results from the newspaper's website without links, thus taking money out of the New York Times' pocket. Incidentally, Microsoft has invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan, reveals that The New York Times had already reached out to Microsoft and OpenAI in April to seek an amicable resolution to their copyright concerns, but to no avail.
(BBC)
