Eight daily newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Tuesday, accusing the tech companies of illegally using news articles to power their AI chatbots.
Publications from the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Florida Sun Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register, and St. Paul Pioneer Press go to the federal government A complaint was filed. Court of the Southern District of New York. All are owned by Media News Group or Tribune Publishing, a subsidiary of Alden, the nation's second-largest newspaper operator.
In their complaint, these publications accuse OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of copyrighted articles without permission to train and feed generative AI products such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. There is. The lawsuit does not seek specific monetary damages, but it does ask for a jury trial and says the publisher is liable for compensation for the use of its content.
According to the complaint, the chatbot regularly displays the full text of articles behind users' subscription paywalls, often without prominently linking to the source. This reduced the need for readers to pay subscription fees to support local newspapers, and deprived publishers of revenue from both subscription fees and content licensing, the paper said.
“We have spent billions of dollars gathering information and reporting news in our publications. Big Tech’s strategy for OpenAI and Microsoft to steal our work and build their own businesses at our expense. We cannot allow it to expand,” Frank Pine said. The editor-in-chief of Alden's newspaper said in a statement:
An OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement that the company was “not previously aware” of Alden's concerns, but had partnered with and had conversations with a number of news organizations to explore opportunities.
“Together with our news partners, we see tremendous potential for AI tools like ChatGPT to deepen publisher-reader relationships and improve the news experience,” she said.
A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment.
The lawsuit further intensifies the battle over the use of data to power AI generation Online information, including articles, Wikipedia posts, and other data, has become the lifeblood of an increasingly fast-growing industry. A recent investigation by the New York Times found that in an effort to keep up, many tech companies ignore policies and circumvent copyright laws in an effort to obtain as much data as possible to train their chatbots. It turned out that they were having a discussion.
Publishers are careful in their use of content. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, accusing it of using copyrighted articles to train chatbots to compete with the paper as a source of news and information. Microsoft is asking for parts of its lawsuit to be dismissed. The Times also argued that it had not shown any real harm and that the large language models that power chatbots would not replace the market for news articles. OpenAI makes a similar argument.
Other publications are trying to reach deals with tech companies to get compensation. The Financial Times, owned by Japan's Nikkei Shimbun, announced on Monday that it had reached an agreement with OpenAI to allow the company to use its content to train its AI chatbot. The Financial Times did not disclose the terms of the deal.
OpenAI also signed a deal with Axel Springer, the German publishing giant that owns Business Insider and Politico. Associated Press; and the French news agency Le Monde.
The lawsuit from Alden Newspapers was filed by Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, and accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of copyright infringement, unfair competition through misappropriation, and trademark dilution. The newspaper said the chatbot falsely promoted publications with inaccurate or misleading reporting, “damaging the newspaper's reputation and spreading dangerous information.”
One example is ChatGPT's answer to a question about infant loungers recommended by the Chicago Tribune. According to the complaint, ChatGPT responded that the Tribune endorsed the Boppy Newborn Lounger, a product that had been recalled after being linked to infant deaths, and that the Tribune never endorsed it. .
In another case, an AI chatbot claimed that the Denver Post published a study showing that smoking could cure asthma, which the lawsuit says is a complete fabrication.
“This problem is not just a management problem for a few newspaper companies or the newspaper industry as a whole,” the lawsuit states. “This is a critical issue for American civic life.”
