Three additional news organizations, namely The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet, have initiated legal action against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement.
The lawsuits were individually filed in the Southern District of New York, with all three cases being handled by the same legal team.
The publications allege that during the training of AI models, OpenAI and Microsoft removed essential copyright information such as author, title, and other relevant details from their works without authorization.
According to the plaintiffs, ChatGPT, the AI model in question, sometimes reproduces copyrighted journalism material without including necessary attribution or terms of use information.
The organizations argue that had ChatGPT been trained on material containing copyright information, it should have been able to incorporate and communicate that information when generating responses.
Raw Story and AlterNet alleged that they knew ChatGPT would be less popular and generate less revenue if users believed its responses violated third-party copyrights.
Both Microsoft and OpenAI provide legal protection to paying customers in case they are sued for copyright infringement while using Copilot or ChatGPT Enterprise.
The lawsuits claim that OpenAI and Microsoft are aware of the potential for copyright infringement, citing OpenAI’s opt-out system allowing website owners to block content from its web crawlers as evidence.
OpenAI and other AI developers have faced copyright lawsuits before, particularly regarding the removal of copyright management metadata.
In a California case involving comedian Sarah Silverman and several authors, it was alleged that OpenAI intentionally removed copyright information from their written work during model training. However, a judge dismissed the claim that the plaintiffs intentionally removed the data, although the core allegation of copyright violation remains unresolved.
The New York Times filed a lawsuit in December alleging that ChatGPT reproduces journalistic work without authorization.
OpenAI responded by requesting a federal court to dismiss the Times’ lawsuit, arguing that the publication took advantage of a bug in ChatGPT to recycle its articles.
OpenAI and Microsoft aren’t the sole targets of copyright lawsuits in this field. Getty Images is suing Stability AI for utilizing its protected images in model training, while Universal Music Group is suing Anthropic for allegedly distributing and recreating lyrics without proper attribution.
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