New York Times in Legal Battle with AI Pioneer OpenAI and Microsoft
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, mainly because AI training requires a large amount of data, and the two defendant companies used New York Times news data for AI learning without permission or payment, which may then be used to generate other news content. The New York Times is seeking billions of dollars in damages and the removal of AI models from chatbots trained on New York Times data.
In response to Newsweek's lawsuit, some media outlets have already entered into content licensing agreements with OpenAI. OpenAI expressed surprise and disappointment that New Times sued when the agreement could not be reached, and hoped that the two parties could continue to work together to find a mutually beneficial way to cooperate. The Wall Street Journal believes that the outcome of this lawsuit between the news industry and the leader in generative AI technology will affect the future of the media industry.
For more than a decade, the publishing industry and the tech industry have played a cooperative and competitive role, with new online media increasing the exposure of the publishing industry, but in turn taking a bite out of advertising revenue, while the tech industry has control of the programs and can manipulate news traffic through algorithms. In the year since the rise of ChatGPT, there have been concerns about its impact on law, finance and journalism, and pressure on people in certain sectors to replace them, but Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is confident, saying, "I'm confident that there will be more jobs, and that it will help existing jobs to be better.
The media and publishing industries understand that AI is the future, and Newsweek is only suing to ensure that it receives fair compensation and to prevent Microsoft and OpenAI from continuing to infringe on its rights. CNN, the U.S. cable news network, is also adding a program to its news website in early 2023 to prevent web crawlers from retrieving large amounts of news content for AI training.
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