Lawyers for the newspaper are exploring whether to sue OpenAI to protect the intellectual property rights associated with its reporting, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
For weeks, the Times and the maker of ChatGPT have been locked in tense negotiations over reaching a licensing deal in which OpenAI would pay the Times for incorporating its stories in the tech company's AI tools, but the discussions have become so contentious that the paper is now considering legal action.
The individuals who confirmed the potential lawsuit requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
OpenAI could become a popular search tool for readers by generating information based on original reporting, driving more readers away from news outlets, and directing them to the AI tool instead. The Times is reportedly considering taking legal action in response to this possibility, saying ChatGPT has already used its data to generate paragraphs of information without the paper’s permission.
It remains unclear whether OpenAI has violated copyright laws. Such a case would see the Times venturing into uncharted waters on a number of fronts. For instance, OpenAI could be ordered to remove the Times’ data from its training model, a move that’s probably impossible without retraining ChatGPT on a new dataset—a very expensive process.
“If you’re copying millions of works, you can see how that becomes a number that becomes potentially fatal for a company,” Daniel Gervais, the co-director of the intellectual property program at Vanderbilt University who studies generative AI, told NPR which first reported on the potential lawsuit. “Copyright law is a sword that’s going to hang over the heads of AI companies for several years unless they figure out how to negotiate a solution.”
Other news outlets have criticized OpenAI for illegally using their articles to train the chatbot, including News Corp. which owns the Wall Street Journal. News Corp’s CEO Robert Thomson spoke on the outrage OpenAI faced from journalists and news outlets at a media conference in May. He said: the “[media’s] collective IP is under threat and for which we should argue vociferously for compensation,” the Financial Times reported. He added: AI was “designed so the reader will never visit a journalism website, thus fatally undermining that journalism.”