Eight newspapers filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Microsoft and OpenAI alleging the tech films have illegally pulled millions of copyrighted articles into their artificial intelligence products at the expense of publishers.
The suit claims generative AI products such as ChatGPT and Copilot have purloined "millions of the Publisher's copyrighted articles without permission and without payment," The New York Daily News reported.
The suit noted how, although OpenAI purported to be non-profit organization at is inception, it is now valued at $90 billion.
"We can't allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense," said Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, which owns seven of the newspapers. "The misappropriation of news content by OpenAI and Microsoft undermines the business model for news.
"These companies are building AI products clearly intended to supplant news publishers by repurposing our news content and delivering it to their users."
The lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York on behalf of The New York Daily News; MediaNews Group-owned Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register, and St. Paul Pioneer-Press; Tribune Publishing's Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, and South Florida Sun Sentinel.
"Microsoft and OpenAI simply take the work product of reporters, journalists, editorial writers, editors, and others who contribute to the work of local newspapers — all without any regard for the effort, much less the legal rights, of those who create and publish the news on which local communities rely," the lawsuit stated.
The technology companies pay the engineers, programmers, and electricity bills, "but they don't want to pay for the content without which they would have no product at all," Pine noted. "That's not fair use, and it's not fair. It needs to stop."
The use of AI has become a major point of concern among not only content creators, but educators as well. Earlier in April, plagiarism detection company Turnitin released data claiming that at least 22 million papers submitted by students last year may have been written using generative AI.
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