OpenAI, Microsoft sued by Center for Investigative Reporting as news industry bolsters attack on AI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a fireside chat organized by Softbank Ventures Asia in Seoul, South Korea, on Friday, June 9, 2023.SeongJoon Cho | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The news industry just gained a powerful ally in its effort to take on OpenAI.

The Center for Investigative Reporting, the country's oldest nonprofit newsroom, sued OpenAI and lead backer Microsoft in federal court on Thursday for alleged copyright infringement, following similar suits from publications including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News.

The CIR alleged in the suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, that OpenAI "copied, used, abridged, and displayed CIR's valuable content without CIR's permission or authorization, and without any compensation to CIR."

Since its public release in late 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot has been crawling the web to provide answers to user queries, often relying heavily on copy pulled directly from news stories.

"When they populated their training sets with works of journalism, Defendants had a choice: to respect works of journalism, or not," the plaintiffs wrote in the lawsuit. "Defendants chose the latter."

In a press release on Thursday, Monika Bauerlein, CEO of the nonprofit, accused the defendants of "free rider behavior."

"OpenAI and Microsoft started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more powerful, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organizations that license our material," Bauerlein said.

The CIR, which is home to Mother Jones and audio programming Reveal, also alleged in the suit that OpenAI "trained ChatGPT not to acknowledge or respect copyright. And they did this all without permission."

The group said it's seeking "actual damages and Defendants' profits, or statutory damages of no less than $750 per infringed work and $2,500 per DMCA violation," referring to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

OpenAI and Microsoft didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

With the news industry broadly struggling to maintain sufficient advertising and subscription revenue to pay for its costly newsgathering operations, many publications are aggressively trying to protect their businesses as AI-generated content becomes more prevalent.

In December, The New York Times filed a suit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging intellectual property violations related to its journalistic content appearing in ChatGPT training data. The Times said it seeks to hold Microsoft and OpenAI accountable for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" related to the "unlawful copying and use of the Times's uniquely valuable works," according to a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. OpenAI disagreed with the Times' characterization of events.

The Chicago Tribune, along with seven other newspapers, followed with a similar suit in April.

Outside of news, a group of prominent U.S. authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult, sued OpenAI last year, alleging copyright infringement in using their work to train ChatGPT.

But not all news organizations are gearing up for a fight, and some are instead joining forces with OpenAI. Earlier on Thursday, OpenAI and Time magazine announced a "multi-year content deal" that will allow OpenAI to access current and archived articles from more than 100 years of Time's history.

OpenAI will be able to display Time's content within its ChatGPT chatbot in response to user questions, according to a press release, and to use Time's content "to enhance its products," or, likely, to train its artificial intelligence models.

OpenAI announced a similar partnership in May with News Corp., allowing OpenAI to access current and archived articles from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron's, the New York Post and other publications. Reddit also announced in May that it will partner with OpenAI, allowing the company to train its AI models on Reddit content.