LOS ANGELES – The Center for Investigative Reporting said Thursday it has sued OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, and its closest commercial partner, Microsoft, marking a new front in the legal battle between news publications fighting unauthorized use of their content. in artificial intelligence platforms.
The non-profit organization, which produces Mother Jones It is To reveal, said that OpenAI used its content without permission and without offering compensation, violating copyright on the organization’s journalism. The lawsuit, filed in New York federal court, focuses on how AI-generated article summaries threaten publishers — a move the CIR called exploitative.
“It’s immensely dangerous,” Monika Bauerlein, the nonprofit’s CEO, told the Associated Press. “Our existence depends on users finding our work valuable and choosing to support it.”
Bauerlein said that “when people can no longer develop that relationship with our work, when they no longer encounter Mother Jones or Reveal, then their relationship is with the AI tool.”
This, she said, could “undercut the entire basis of our existence as an independent newsroom” while threatening the future of other news organizations.
The lawsuit is the latest against OpenAI and Microsoft to reach Manhattan federal court, where the companies are already fighting a series of other copyright lawsuits. from The New York Times, other media and bestselling authors such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and George RR Martin. The companies also face a separate case in San Francisco federal court brought by plaintiffs including comedian Sarah Silverman.
Some news organizations have chosen to collaborate rather than fight with OpenAI, signing agreements to be compensated for sharing news content that can be used to train their AI systems. The last to do so is Team, who announced Thursday that OpenAI will have access to its “extensive archives from the last 101 years”.
OpenAI and other major AI developers do not disclose their data sources, but argued that collecting a large amount of publicly accessible online texts, images It is other media for train your AI systems is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of U.S. copyright law.
Last summer, more than 4,000 writers signed a letter to the CEOs of OpenAI and other technology companies, accusing them of exploitative practices in building chatbots.
“It’s not a free resource for these AI companies to consume and make money,” Bauerlein said of the news media. “They pay for offices, for electricity, they pay their workers’ salaries. Why would the content they ingest be the only thing they don’t pay for?”
The AP is among the news organizations that entered into licensing deals with OpenAI last year; others include The Wall Street Journal and publisher News Corp. from the New York Post, The Atlantic, Axel Springer in Germany and Prisa Media in Spain, the French newspaper Le Monde and the London-based Financial Times.
Mother Jones and CIR were founded in the 1970s and merged earlier this year. Both are based in San Francisco, as is OpenAI.
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O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.
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The Associated Press and OpenAI a licensing and technology agreement which allows OpenAI access to part of the AP text files.
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