LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Center for Investigative Reporting said Thursday it has filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT developer OpenAI and its closest business partner, Microsoft, marking a new front in the news industry's fight against unauthorized use of its content. artificial intelligence platform.
Non-profit organizations: Mother Jones and revealThe lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, describes OpenAI's business as “based on the exploitation of copyrighted works” and focuses on how its AI-generated summaries of articles threaten publishers.
“This is very dangerous,” Monica Bauerlein, the nonprofit's CEO, told The Associated Press. “We depend on people finding what we do valuable and deciding to support us.”
“When people no longer have a relationship with our work — when they no longer encounter Mother Jones or Reveal — their relationship will be with their AI tools,” Bauerlein said.
It “threatens to destroy the whole basis of our existence as an independent news organisation” while also threatening the future of other news organisations, she said.
The suit is the latest against OpenAI and Microsoft to be brought in federal court in Manhattan, with the companies already embroiled in a series of other copyright disputes. From the New York Times, Other Media Its members include best-selling authors John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George R. R. Martin. The companies also face a separate lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court by authors including comedian Sarah Silverman.
Rather than fight OpenAI, some news organizations have chosen to cooperate by signing deals to get paid to share news content that can be used to train AI systems, the most recent example being Time magazine. Announced Thursday OpenAI will have access to a “vast archive going back 101 years.”
OpenAI did not directly respond to the lawsuit on Thursday, but said in a statement that it “works with the news industry and partners with news publishers around the world to surface content, including summaries, quotes and sources, in our products, like ChatGPT, and drive traffic back to the original articles.” Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI and other major AI developers do not typically publish their data sources, It has been argued that A mountain of publicly available online texts image and Other Media To Training an AI system It is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of U.S. copyright law. According to CIR's lawsuit, the dataset that OpenAI acknowledged using to build an early version of its chatbot technology included thousands of links to the website of Mother Jones, a 48-year-old print magazine that has been published online since 1993. But the text used to train the AI typically lacked information about the article's author, title, or copyright notice.
Last summer, more than 4,000 authors Signed the letter He accused CEOs of OpenAI and other tech companies of exploitative practices in building chatbots.
“News media is not a free resource that AI companies are ingesting and profiting from,” Bauerlein said. “They pay for the office space, they pay for the electricity, they pay employees. Why should the content they ingest be the only thing they don't pay for?”
The Associated Press is one of several news organizations that have signed licensing deals with OpenAI in the past year, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Post publisher News Corp, The Atlantic, Germany's Axel Springer, Spain's Prisa Media, France's Le Monde and the London-based Financial Times.
Mother Jones and CIR, both founded in the 1970s, merged earlier this year and are both based in San Francisco, just like OpenAI.
The lawsuit from CIR, which also knows for its “Reveal” podcast and radio show, outlines the costs of producing investigative journalism and warns that losing control over copyrighted content will reduce revenue and mean even fewer reporters can break important stories in “today's impoverished media environment.”
“The costs to democracy of less investigative journalism would be enormous,” the lawsuit states.
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O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.
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The Associated Press and OpenAI License and Technology Agreements This gives OpenAI access to parts of the AP's text archive.
