The Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

(Central News Agency, New York, Comprehensive Foreign Reports on the 4th) Following the New York Times, the Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit in the U.S. court today against artificial intelligence (AI) developer OpenAI and its major shareholder Microsoft, accusing them of copying reported content to train their own models without permission.

Reuters reported that The Seattle Times and Newsday, based in Long Island, New York, said in a complaint filed with the District Court for the Southern District of New York that OpenAI and Microsoft were involved in importing content collections from their websites, including paid subscriptions, into datasets used by the two companies to train and operate their own AI products, including ChatGPT, Copilot and the AI ​​capabilities of Microsoft's search engine Bing.

The Seattle Times and Newsday allege that OpenAI and Microsoft's AI products can therefore reproduce the content of their reports, rewrite the news in a similar way, and provide user answers, thus reducing the need for people to visit these media websites or pay for subscriptions.

The two newspapers asked the court to order OpenAI and Microsoft to destroy copies of their reporting content, as well as training data sets or AI models containing the content.

A spokesperson for OpenAI did not comment specifically on the lawsuit, saying only that its models are trained on publicly available data and in accordance with the principle of "fair use."

A Microsoft spokesperson responded by email: "This lawsuit comes as a surprise to us. We understand the importance of local news and are always happy to sit down and find a solution to these types of disputes."

The New York Times has filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing the two companies of using millions of its reporting articles to train OpenAI's popular chatbot without permission. The case is still under trial.