A group led by the NYT will ask the court to approve OpenAI in a copyright dispute in the US | Media News

Media companies claim that the developer of ChatGPT is hiding important evidence that could be a case of copyright infringement.

The New York Times, Daily News and other US media are asking a federal judge in the United States to punish OpenAI, expanding the fight against artificial intelligence (AI) and copyright that could change the future of the media industry.

Newspapers say that the creator of ChatGPT is hiding important evidence that could be a case of copyright infringement of how OpenAI and its business partner, Microsoft, developed their AI technologies using millions of stories. The issue is whether AI chatbots are competing unfairly as a source of information, taking many people off the internet without doing the journalistic work involved in gathering news.

Thursday’s filing in Manhattan federal court says OpenAI “opted in to block” the release of ChatGPT data and documents that could reveal how the AI ​​system uses copyrighted content. The plaintiffs are asking the judge to punish the company for “falsified findings” that could distort the evidence, saying that the recent disclosure of an OpenAI employee contradicts the company’s previous statements.

Attorney for the New York Daily News, Steven Lieberman, said OpenAI has been “making lies” for two years about its ability to search for copyrighted material in its AI training sets and logs.

“This petition asks the court to punish OpenAI for concealing and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism,” said Lieberman, who represents the Daily News and its seven papers.

OpenAI has previously stated that converting ChatGPT’s documentation may risk violating user privacy.

“As the Times’ case weakens and they are forced to stop accusing us, they continue to try to hide the secrets of people who have nothing to do with the story, including these lies,” OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri said in response to the press release, Reuters reported.

Substance abuse

The New York Times (NYT) filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, a year after ChatGPT launched AI commercials and began changing the way people search for information online. The threat to the media became more apparent when Google in 2024 implemented an AI-generated summary at the top of the Internet search results, cutting off the advertising revenue that comes when people click on a link to the source. The NYT then merged with other media companies.

The case is one of many brought by copyright owners including authors, artists and music labels against technology companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms for misusing their material to train AI systems.

The Times has already spent more than $28m fighting AI companies in court, according to filings with financial regulators that disclose its finances. The settlement includes another lawsuit the newspaper filed last year against the AI ​​company Perplexity.

The growing revenue comes as more and more media organizations have signed licenses with OpenAI and other AI companies such as Google and Facebook’s parent Meta that pay royalties to be able to train AI systems on their feed or past. The Associated Press was the first to announce such a partnership with OpenAI in 2023.