NY Times lawsuit holds OpenAI and Microsoft 'responsible for the billions of dollars they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times's uniquely valuable works'

SoftwareAINY Times lawsuit holds OpenAI and Microsoft ‘responsible for the billions of dollars they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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But yeah, it’s going to be looking for a pretty large payout if it does win.

“The law does not permit the kind of systematic and competitive infringement that Defendants have committed,” reads theofficial complaint(pdf warning). “This action seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”

The lawsuit states that the New York Times had been in negotiations with the defendants “for months” and that it was looking to reach an agreement “in accordance with its history of working productively with large technology platforms to permit the use of its content in new digital products.” The idea put forward in the court document is that its goal was both to get fair value out of its contribution to the training, because of the weighting The Times’ content was given during training, and to “facilitate the continuation of a healthy news ecosystem, and help develop GenAI technology in a responsible way that benefits society and supports a well-informed public.”

“We’re hopeful that we will find a mutually beneficial way to work together,” they are quoted as saying, “as we are doing with many other publishers.”

One of the most intriguing parts of the lawsuit, and arguably the part that has got The Times’ hackles up, is that it seems like OpenAI has given particular weight to the publisher’s content during the training of its LLMs.

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During the training of GPT-3 specifically, the lawsuit states that one of the key datasets—one weighted as high quality set—used nearly 210k unique New York Times URLs, which amounted to 1.23% of all the sources in the dataset.

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Microsoft Copilot screenshot

The largest, and most heavily weighted dataset used to train GPT-3, however, includes “at least 16 million unique records of content from The Times across News, Cooking, Wirecutter, and The Athletic.”

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And it’s unlikely to be the last lawsuit against AI makers, either. But given the seeming reticence of AI companies to tackle the issues of copyright infringement, and fair compensation for the training of their multi-billion dollar products themselves, it’s looking like legal proceedings might be one of the few ways to keep them in check.

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