New York Times Sues OpenAI: GPT Models in Major Copyright Battle

TLDR: New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for billions over GPT models’ alleged copyright infringement of news articles.

This article is a summary of a You Tube video “The End of GPT-4? New York Times and OpenAI Lawsuit” by Wes Roth

Key Takeaways:

1. New York Times Lawsuit Against OpenAI: The New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, targeting not just OpenAI but also associated companies like Microsoft.
2. Massive Compensation Demands: The lawsuit involves demands for potentially billions of dollars and the deletion of models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 trained on New York Times data.
3. Precedents in AI Copyright Lawsuits: There have been similar lawsuits in the past against AI models by various entities, often yielding poor results for the plaintiffs.
4. Judicial Perspective on AI and Copyright: U.S. courts have generally dismissed cases that attack the inputs of AI models (i.e., the training data), focusing instead on the output as potential copyright infringement.
5. The Significance of Output in Copyright Infringement: The main issue in such lawsuits is whether the AI’s output infringes on someone’s copyright, not necessarily the learning process or the data used.
6. Legal Precedents Favoring AI: Courts have not recognized AI models as infringing derivative works simply based on their training on copyrighted materials.
7. The Specifics of the New York Times’ Claims: The lawsuit claims OpenAI’s tools, using Microsoft Bing’s search index, generate responses with verbatim excerpts and detailed summaries of Times articles, affecting the newspaper’s relationship with its readers and causing financial harm.
8. Examples of Alleged Infringement by OpenAI: The New York Times has provided examples where GPT models reproduced substantial parts of their articles.
9. OpenAI’s Response to Requests for Copyrighted Material: There are differences in how different versions of GPT models respond to requests for copyrighted text, with newer models linking to articles or refusing to provide verbatim excerpts.
10. Questions About the Validity of the Lawsuit’s Claims: The case might hinge on whether the AI models actually contain copies of copyrighted material and how they reproduce such content.