The New York Times has become the first major US media company to sue OpenAI and Microsoft over their artificial intelligence chatbots, alleging the tech companies have taken a “free-ride” on millions of articles to build the groundbreaking technology.
The newspaper is seeking unspecified billions of dollars in damages from the two companies for “profit[ing] from the massive copyright infringement, commercial exploitation and misappropriation of The Times’s intellectual property”.
The move comes as media companies have grown increasingly concerned that generative AI models — which can spew out humanlike text, images and code in seconds — may have been fed their content during their creation without permission or compensation.