By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
News outlets The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, joining the fight against unauthorized use of journalism by generative artificial intelligence.
The organizations say thousands of their stories were used by OpenAI to train its ChatGPT chatbot to answer questions posed to it by users, essentially using their journalistic work without permission, payment or credit.
Annie Chabel, CEO of The Intercept, says the practice of delivering news to internet users through AI bots is yet another financial blow to the news media, which is already suffering due to social media platforms and Google dominating the advertising industry.
“As newsrooms throughout the country are decimated by financial imperatives to cut back, OpenAI reaps the benefits of our content,” Chabel said. “We hope this lawsuit will send a strong message to AI developers who chose to ignore our copyrights and free ride on the hard work of our journalists.”
The use of generative AI to access news is one of the hottest legal topics facing the news media this year. The New York Times filed a lawsuit in December, 2023, after negotiations for compensation broke down. Other news outlets, including the wire service The Associated Press, have signed licensing deals for the use of their material.
Many other news outlets have no such deal in place, and they allege AI companies are essentially stealing their content and violating their copyright. While the three outlets in this latest cast have not yet shown specific examples of articles or information they allege were stolen, they do say some of the material that ChatGPT was trained on were originally produced by one of the three news outlets.
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“When providing responses, ChatGPT gives the impression that it is an all-knowing ‘intelligent’ source of the information being provided, when in reality, the responses are frequently based on copyrighted works of journalism that ChatGPT simply mimics,” the lawsuit says.
There is a legal wrinkle facing digital publications that would not be faced by a print publication like the New York Times. News outlets that print a newspaper or magazine are able to pay a federal copyright registration fee that covers all of its material in bulk, but this option is not available to digital-only publications.
However, lawyers representing the media companies argue their content is copyright-protected even without paying the fee.
The lawsuit does not identify an overall dollar amount for the damages sought, but rather asks for at least $2,500 for each story that has been used by ChatGPT to provide information to its users.
The San Francisco-based developer OpenAI has not yet responded to the lawsuit.
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