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Generative AI is just one year into the public, and there have been a ton of lawsuits thrown around regarding this technology. Two of the biggest players in the AI game are now being sued by one of the biggest publication companies. The New York Times is now suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyrighted material.
This is one of many lawsuits going around nowadays. Several artists, writers, musicians, celebrities, etc. are taking AI companies to court for using their material without their consent. In order to train AI, companies need to scrape a ton of data from thousands of websites. This data could be in the form of pictures, text, music, vocal samples, and so on.
Then, AI companies use the stolen material in their services. Image generators create pictures using image data scraped from artists. That’s just one example. The lawsuits are just going to keep flowing in as AI companies continue to scrape data.
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft
When an AI chatbot gives you information on a major legal case that occurred in recent history, you’re likely to see excerpts from news articles. Guess what, you’re probably looking at an excerpt from a copyrighted and paywalled article from the New York Times. The NY Times is one of the major forces in American journalism, and it’s not too happy with OpenAI.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the most popular chatbot on the market, and it’s a reservoir of a metric ton of scraped data. Well, The New York Times says that the company scraped millions of articles from the publication. This, according to the company, resulted in billions of dollars in damages. Whether or not that equates to billions of dollars, we don’t really know.
According to the report, The New York Times tried to reach out to the companies in order to come to some sort of accord, but that fell through. So, this seems to be the only course of action left.
When it comes to big cases like these, there’s no telling what could happen. It seems unlikely that the companies will lose billions of dollars in the suit. There’s always the chance that the entities will settle behind closed doors. We’ll need to wait for more information on this matter as it comes out.