Eight US Newspapers File Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Microsoft

A group of eight US newspapers filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI. They claim that the tech companies used their articles to train generative AI models without permission.

The newspapers, owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group, stated in the lawsuit that Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are purloining millions of the publishers’ copyrighted articles without permission and without payment to fuel the commercialization of their GenAI products and services. The publishers allege OpenAI used their articles to train its GPT-2 and GPT-3 LLMs and noted the current GPT-4 LLM will output near-verbatim copies of significant portions of the Publishers’ Works when prompted to do so. For Microsoft, the lawsuit stated the tech giant is copying information from their newspapers for its Bing search index which in turn helps generate answers in its Copilot chatbot without providing hyperlinks back to the newspapers’ websites.

The lawsuit also highlighted ChatGPT-generated hallucinations such as stating a newspaper article erroneously credited smoking as a cure for asthma. “As if plagiarizing the publishers’ work was not enough, defendants’ products are often subject to ‘hallucinations’ where those products malign the publishers’ credibility by falsely attributing inaccurate reporting to the publishers’ newspapers. Beyond just profiting from the theft of the publishers’ content, defendants are actively tarnishing the newspapers’ reputations and spreading dangerous disinformation”.