The New York Times would consider filing a complaint against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The newspaper is considering this move to defend its copyright.

The New York Times is considering legal action against OpenAI, according to two anonymous sources with direct knowledge of the matter. The newspaper wants to file a lawsuit to keep its copyrighted material away from the AI ​​developer. The two spoke about it with the independent radio station NRP.

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Like many online materials, the NYT articles are useful for training large language models. The newspaper has been in talks with OpenAI for a long time in order to agree on a price for the use of its texts. However, that consultation has since stalled to such an extent that the Times would therefore consider legal action.

The newspaper has since changed its terms of use. It is now said that all material is copyrighted and may not be used to develop software. This also includes the training of AI.

In a lawsuit in New York

The newspaper expresses great reservations and even sees ChatGPT as a possible competitor in the near future. Mainly because the chatbot uses content from NYT articles and interviews, things written by people at the newspaper, in its answers. The fear is, for example, that answers generated by AI in search engines, which are also increasingly controlled by AI, will perform better than the original. Users would then look much less at the original.

Models like ChatGPT scour the internet as training for any information they can find. Such chatbots base their answers and suggestions on this data. If the Times pulls through and wins, it would be a huge blow to large language models like OpenAI. This would mean nothing less than completely changing their records and only using material for which permission has been granted.

Federal penalties in such cases are steep in the US and can be as high as $150,000 per violation. This would clearly be a disaster for AI companies, as they have millions of items to process.

Financially, OpenAI is not doing very well anyway. Last month there was also a report that the number of ChatGPT users had fallen for the first time. Furthermore, if the NYT perseveres and wins, it will have a snowball effect of unprecedented proportions as others will no doubt follow the paper’s example.

Not the only ones

There are already organizations and individuals engaging in litigation with AI companies. For example, comedian Sarah Silverman joined a class action lawsuit against OpenAI. She claims she never gave the company permission to use her bio, which she did.

It’s not just about LLMs and texts, either. Meanwhile, Getty Images is suing Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion. The imagery provider has never consented to the use of its library for AI training. Getty’s photos can be identified by the semi-transparent frame on his photos when they have not been paid for. This frame has practically already appeared in AI image generators that have trained with it and simply adopted the name.