ChatGPT-maker braces for fight with New York Times and authors on ‘fair use’ of copyrighted works

A barrage of high-profile lawsuits in a New York federal court will test the future of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence products that wouldn’t be so eloquent had they not ingested huge troves of copyrighted human works. THE RESPONSE OpenAI and Microsoft haven’t yet filed formal counter-arguments on the New York cases, but OpenAI made a public statement this week describing The Times lawsuit as “without merit” and saying that the chatbot’s ability to regurgitate some articles verbatim was a “rare bug.” “Training AI models using publicly available internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents,” said a Monday blog post from the company. But its blog post this week downplayed the importance of news content for AI training, arguing that large language models learn from an “enormous aggregate of human knowledge” and that “any single data source — including The New York Times — is not significant for the model’s intended learning.” WHO’S GOING TO WIN? In response, the legal team representing The Times wrote Tuesday that what OpenAI and Microsoft are doing is “not fair use by any measure” because they’re taking from the newspaper’s investment in its journalism “to build substitutive products without permission or payment.” So far, courts have largely sided with tech companies in interpreting how copyright laws should treat AI systems. But judges interpret fair use arguments on a case-by-case basis and it is “actually very fact-dependent,” depending on economic impact and other factors, said Cathy Wolfe, an executive at the Dutch firm Wolters Kluwer who also sits on the board of the Copyright Clearance Center, which helps negotiate print and digital media licenses in the U.S. “Just because something is free on the internet, on a website, doesn’t mean you can copy it and email it, let alone use it to conduct commercial business,” Wolfe said.