Three prominent digital media companies including The Intercept have filed lawsuits against AI giants OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement related to the ChatGPT chatbot.
The Verge reports that The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet recently filed separate lawsuits in the Southern District of New York claiming that ChatGPT reproduces verbatim or near-verbatim excerpts from copyrighted journalistic works without providing proper attribution. The lawsuits, all represented by the same law firm, argue that ChatGPT training data likely included complete articles with author names, publication names, and other copyright information intact. However, the AI model does not communicate this information when generating responses, indicating the data was intentionally removed or altered during training.
OpenAI logo seen on screen with ChatGPT website displayed on mobile seen in this illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on December 12, 2022. (Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The publications cite ChatGPT’s ability to reproduce long passages from books and articles as evidence that it was trained on full copyrighted texts. Raw Story and AlterNet’s lawsuit goes further, alleging OpenAI and Microsoft had incentive to remove copyright information so ChatGPT would appear to users as if it was not violating third-party copyrights. The companies offer enterprise customers legal protection against copyright lawsuits related to Copilot and ChatGPT usage.
These lawsuits point to OpenAI and Microsoft’s knowledge of possible copyright infringement, noting OpenAI’s opt-out system allowing website owners to block their content from web scrapers. The companies have faced prior allegations of intentionally stripping metadata, including an earlier lawsuit alleging copyright violations that was partially dismissed on that specific claim. However, the core complaint of overall copyright infringement remains active.
Similar accusations have been levied against other AI firms like Stability AI and Anthropic in recent months as generative models produce more human-like writing. Major media outlets like the New York Times have also sued OpenAI over ChatGPT regurgitating full articles, though OpenAI contends the Times exploited a bug to force the behavior.
Read more at the Verge here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.