Need to Know

The New York Times Co. is suing OpenAI and Microsoft Corp. over copyright infringement claims that the firms used New York Times articles to train artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots without the company’s permission. The New York Times Co. is not the first to raise complaints about its work being used to train chatbots; authors including George R. R. Martin and Jodi Piccoult are suing OpenAI on similar claims. The complaint, filed on Dec. 27, 2023, states that the tech companies failed to reach agreements that would allow them to license New York Times content for a fee. Additionally, the New York Times Co. claimed that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot offered responses that were almost word-for-word the same as the New York Times articles without correctly attributing the information to the newspaper. The complaint, filed with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, states that these AI tools are now threatening “high-quality journalism” through its practices...

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Heather Kierzek is assistant editor of Directorship magazine.