New York Times in lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft

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The New York Times, which is leading the charge against artificial intelligence, is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for damages of billions of dollars.

The Times has launched legal action against Microsoft and OpenAI, claiming that they have violated copyright. The major US daily claims that the two businesses used millions of stories from the New York newspaper to train their artificial intelligence models, putting their systems in direct competition with its content. The publisher of the newspaper filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York a few hours ago, citing threats to the Times' ability to continue providing that service from OpenAI and Microsoft, who are using the Times' work illegally to advance their artificial intelligence products and become competitors.

To put it briefly, millions of articles and insights written by newspaper journalists—many of which were produced without their permission or even a source citation—were used to build artificial intelligence.

The Times filed a complaint alleging that ChatGPT and Copilot's sophisticated language models from Microsoft and OpenAI are able to produce replies that mimic, summarize, or exactly match the expressive tone of Times stories. A method that, in the newspaper's opinion, ruins its rapport with readers and lowers its revenue from affiliates, subscriptions, licensing, and advertising.

The New York Times charges Sam Altam's firm and the one created by Bill Gates with billions of dollars in real and legal damages, without estimating the extent of economic harm.

It should be recalled that at the start of 2023, Microsoft itself made a massive investment of around 10 billion euros in the artificial intelligence technology created by OpenAI. An agreement on a merger that has also put the European Antitrust in the spotlight as it looks into possible breaches of competition laws. In the meanwhile, in order to stop Altman's business from extracting material from its website, the Times, along with the BBC, CNN, and Reuters, has chosen to disable the web crawler, or OpenAI's online content analysis engine.