Suit was filed on December 27, 2023, by THE NEW YORK TIMES CORPORATION v. MICROSOFT CORPORATION, OPENAI, INC., et al. in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Case 1:23-cv-11195.
Plaintiff alleges in paragraph 2 of the Complaint: “Defendants’ unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service. Defendants’ generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) tools rely on large-language models (“LLMs”) that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more. While Defendants engaged in widescale copying from many sources, they gave Times content particular emphasis when building their LLMs—revealing a preference that recognizes the value of those works. Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as “Copilot”) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.
When the dust settles, the boundaries of when intermediate copying of copyrighted works to train AI is fair use or copyright infringement will be defined.