OpenAI Seeks to Dismiss Parts of The New York Times's Lawsuit – The New York Times
Artificial Intelligence
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The artificial intelligence start-up argued that its online chatbot, ChatGPT, is not a substitute for a New York Times subscription.
Cade Metz and
Reporting from San Francisco and New York
OpenAI filed a motion in federal court on Monday that seeks to dismiss some key elements of a lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company.
The Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft on Dec. 27, accusing them of infringing on its copyrights by using millions of its articles to train A.I. technologies like the online chatbot ChatGPT. Chatbots now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information, the lawsuit said.
In the motion, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the defendants argue that ChatGPT “is not in any way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times.”
“In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product for that purpose,” the filing said. “Nor could they. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”
OpenAI did not dispute in its filing that it “copied millions of The Times’s works to build and power its commercial products without our permission,” Ian B. Crosby, a partner at Susman Godfrey and the lead counsel for The Times, said in a statement.
“What OpenAI bizarrely mischaracterizes as ‘hacking’ is simply using OpenAI’s products to look for evidence that they stole and reproduced the Times’s copyrighted works,’ he said. “And that is exactly what we found.”
OpenAI declined to comment.
The motion asked the court to dismiss four claims from The Times’s complaint to narrow the focus of the lawsuit. OpenAI’s lawyers argued that The Times should not be allowed to sue for acts of reproduction that occurred more than three years ago and that the paper’s claim that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an amendment to U.S. copyright law passed in 1998 after the rise of the internet, was not legally sound.
The Times was the first major American media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Novelists, computer programmers and other groups have also filed copyright suits against the start-up and other companies that build generative A.I., technologies that generate text, images and other media from short prompts.
Like other A.I. companies, OpenAI built its technology by feeding it enormous amounts of digital data, some of which is likely copyrighted. A.I. companies have claimed that they can legally use such material to train their systems without paying for it because it is public and they are not reproducing the material in its entirety.
In its suit, The Times included examples of OpenAI technology’s reproducing excerpts from its articles almost verbatim. In the motion to dismiss, lawyers for OpenAI accused The Times of paying someone to hack their chatbot. “It took them tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results,” the motion said.
“They were able to do so only by targeting and exploiting a bug (which OpenAI has committed to addressing) by using deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use,” the filing said.
The filing also argued that it was legal to use copyrighted material in its systems, citing legal precedents that allow for the use of copyrighted content “in the creation of new, different and innovative products.”
“OpenAI and the other defendants in these lawsuits will ultimately prevail because no one — not even The New York Times — gets to monopolize facts or the rules of language,” the complaint said.
Cade Metz writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology. More about Cade Metz
Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: katie.robertson@nytimes.com More about Katie Robertson
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This article was autogenerated from a news feed from CDO TIMES selected high quality news and research sources. There was no editorial review conducted beyond that by CDO TIMES staff. Need help with any of the topics in our articles? Schedule your free CDO TIMES Tech Navigator call today to stay ahead of the curve and gain insider advantages to propel your business!
Advertisement
Supported by
The artificial intelligence start-up argued that its online chatbot, ChatGPT, is not a substitute for a New York Times subscription.
Cade Metz and
Reporting from San Francisco and New York
OpenAI filed a motion in federal court on Monday that seeks to dismiss some key elements of a lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company.
The Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft on Dec. 27, accusing them of infringing on its copyrights by using millions of its articles to train A.I. technologies like the online chatbot ChatGPT. Chatbots now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information, the lawsuit said.
In the motion, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the defendants argue that ChatGPT “is not in any way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times.”
“In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product for that purpose,” the filing said. “Nor could they. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”
OpenAI did not dispute in its filing that it “copied millions of The Times’s works to build and power its commercial products without our permission,” Ian B. Crosby, a partner at Susman Godfrey and the lead counsel for The Times, said in a statement.
“What OpenAI bizarrely mischaracterizes as ‘hacking’ is simply using OpenAI’s products to look for evidence that they stole and reproduced the Times’s copyrighted works,’ he said. “And that is exactly what we found.”
OpenAI declined to comment.
The motion asked the court to dismiss four claims from The Times’s complaint to narrow the focus of the lawsuit. OpenAI’s lawyers argued that The Times should not be allowed to sue for acts of reproduction that occurred more than three years ago and that the paper’s claim that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an amendment to U.S. copyright law passed in 1998 after the rise of the internet, was not legally sound.
The Times was the first major American media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Novelists, computer programmers and other groups have also filed copyright suits against the start-up and other companies that build generative A.I., technologies that generate text, images and other media from short prompts.
Like other A.I. companies, OpenAI built its technology by feeding it enormous amounts of digital data, some of which is likely copyrighted. A.I. companies have claimed that they can legally use such material to train their systems without paying for it because it is public and they are not reproducing the material in its entirety.
In its suit, The Times included examples of OpenAI technology’s reproducing excerpts from its articles almost verbatim. In the motion to dismiss, lawyers for OpenAI accused The Times of paying someone to hack their chatbot. “It took them tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results,” the motion said.
“They were able to do so only by targeting and exploiting a bug (which OpenAI has committed to addressing) by using deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use,” the filing said.
The filing also argued that it was legal to use copyrighted material in its systems, citing legal precedents that allow for the use of copyrighted content “in the creation of new, different and innovative products.”
“OpenAI and the other defendants in these lawsuits will ultimately prevail because no one — not even The New York Times — gets to monopolize facts or the rules of language,” the complaint said.
Cade Metz writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology. More about Cade Metz
Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: katie.robertson@nytimes.com More about Katie Robertson
News and Analysis
A new flood of child sexual abuse material created by A.I. is threatening to overwhelm the authorities already held back by antiquated technology and laws. As a result, legislators are working on bills to combat A.I.-generated sexually explicit images of minors.
Users of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger will soon be able to use newly added smart assistants, powered by Meta’s latest artificial intelligence model, to obtain information and complete tasks.
Microsoft said that it would make a $1.5 billion investment in G42, an A.I. giant in the United Arab Emirates, in a deal largely orchestrated by the Biden administration to box out China.
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Much as ChatGPT generates poetry, a new A.I. system devises blueprints for microscopic mechanisms that can edit your DNA.
Could A.I. change India’s elections? Avatars are addressing voters by name, in whichever of India’s many languages they speak. Experts see potential for misuse in a country already rife with disinformation.
Which A.I. system writes the best computer code or generates the most realistic image? Right now, there’s no easy way to answer those questions, our technology columnist writes.
U.S. clinics are starting to offer patients a new service: having their mammograms read not just by a radiologist, but also by an A.I. model.
A.I. tools can replace much of Wall Street’s entry-level white-collar work, raising tough questions about the future of finance.
Advertisement
This article was autogenerated from a news feed from CDO TIMES selected high quality news and research sources. There was no editorial review conducted beyond that by CDO TIMES staff. Need help with any of the topics in our articles? Schedule your free CDO TIMES Tech Navigator call today to stay ahead of the curve and gain insider advantages to propel your business!
