ChatGPT, can you generate an obvious lawsuit that everyone should have seen coming?

The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Federal District Court of Manhattan on Wednesday morning—the first major US media company to do so. The suit claims that the two companies infringed upon the Times's copyright when it used millions of articles to train its various large-language model AI systems, including ChatGPT.

"Defendants’ unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service," reads the suit. "Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as “Copilot”) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment."

And that "free ride" has led to a massive financial boon for both OpenAI and Microsoft. Earlier this month, OpenAI began talks to raise a new round of funding that would value it at $100 billion—making it the second most-valuable American startup behind SpaceX, writes Bloomberg. Meanwhile, Microsoft has seen its share price jump over 54% since ChatGPT was released at the end of November 2022. Yet, for all the untold billions Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, et al. have reaped from their AI models, the New York Times does not have a specific amount its seeking for the copyright claims. Instead, they state that the suit "seeks to hold [Microsoft and OpenAI] responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works."

OpenAI is sticking to its argument that it used the Times's articles under the legal doctrine of 'fair use'. In a 2019 document submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office, the company wrote: "We submit that proper application of fair use factors requires a finding of fair use, especially considering the highly transformative nature of training AI systems. This conclusion is strengthened by reference to existing analogous case law holding that the reproduction of copyrighted works as one step in the process of computational data analysis is a fair use of those works."

GETTY IMAGES

OpenAI and Microsoft aren't the only companies facing such copyright infringement suits. Earlier this year, stock image behemoth Getty Images sued StabilityAI, which released its AI image generator Stable Diffusion in mid-2022. As Reuters notes, Getty claimed it licensed millions of its images to other companies to train their AI models, but StabilityAI stole the images rather than license them. The suit asked for an injunction of the company using its photos, and sought monetary damages tied to StabilityAI's profits. In October, Getty filed a second lawsuit against StabilityAI, this time in the UK. The tech firm asked the judge to throw the suit out, and called Getty's claims "hopeless".

THE VERDICT:

Yes, the toothpaste is already out of the tube somewhat here in the sense that OpenAI is a multi-billion dollar company, ChatGPT is a widely used product, and the New York Times had millions of its articles used il/legally as training data. That being said, the entire AI revolution has happened extremely fast, and it will take companies like the Times and Getty to curb OpenAI's practices rather than individual authors and artists.