OpenAI and Microsoft sued for ‘exploitative’ copyright infringement

The Centre for Investigative Reporting (CIR) has said it has sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its closest business partner, Microsoft, marking a new front in the legal battle between news publications fighting against unauthorised use of their content on artificial intelligence (AI) platforms.

The nonprofit, which produces the Mother Jones and Reveal news outlets, said that OpenAI used its content without permission and without offering compensation, violating copyrights on the organisation’s journalism.

The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court, focuses on how AI-generated summaries of articles threaten publishers — a move CIR called exploitative.

“It’s immensely dangerous,” Monika Bauerlein, the nonprofit’s chief executive told The Associated Press. “Our existence relies on users finding our work valuable and deciding to support it.”

Ms 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”.

That, she said, could “cut the entire foundation of our existence as an independent newsroom out from under us” while also threatening the future of other news organisations.

The lawsuit is the latest against OpenAI and Microsoft to arrive at Manhattan’s federal court, where the companies are already battling a series of other copyright lawsuits from The New York Times, other media outlets and bestselling authors such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George RR Martin.

The companies also face a separate case in San Francisco’s federal court brought by authors including comedian Sarah Silverman.

Some news organisations have chosen to collaborate rather than fight with OpenAI by signing deals to get compensated for sharing news content that can be used to train its AI systems. The latest to do so is Time, which announced on Thursday that OpenAI will get access to its “extensive archives from the last 101 years”.

OpenAI and other major AI developers do not disclose their data sources but have argued that taking troves of publicly accessible online text, images and other media to train their AI systems is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of American copyright law.

Last summer, more than 4,000 writers signed a letter to the bosses of OpenAI and other tech companies accusing them of exploitative practices in building chatbots.

“It’s not a free resource for these AI companies to ingest and make money on,” Ms Bauerlein said of news media. “They pay for office space, they pay for electricity, they pay salaries for their workers. Why would the content that they ingest be the only thing that they don’t (pay for)?”

The AP is among the news organisations that have made licensing deals over the past year with OpenAI; others include The Wall Street Journal and New York Post publisher News Corp, The Atlantic, Axel Springer in Germany and Prisa Media in Spain, France’s Le Monde newspaper and the Financial Times in the UK.

Mother Jones and CIR were both founded in the 1970s and merged earlier this year. Both are based in San Francisco, as is OpenAI.

OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.