• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, April 30, 2024

OpenAI and Microsoft have been sued by another big publishing concern. 

Months after being served with a complaint by the New York Times, the company has been hit with a lawsuit by eight newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group, including Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pioneer-Press; Tribune Publishing’s Chicago Tribune,Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel; and New York Daily News.

The action stems from the defendants’ “purloining millions of the Publishers’ copyrighted articles without permission and without payment to fuel the commercialization of their generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) products, including ChatGPT and Copilot,” it says. 

The suit, which was filed Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, asks for statutory and compensatory damages and “the destruction of all GPT or LLM (large-language) models and training sets that incorporate the Publishers’ Works.” 

“We can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense,” says Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, in a statement.  

Pine adds, “The misappropriation of news content by OpenAI and Microsoft undermines the business model for news. These companies are building AI products clearly intended to supplant news publishers by repurposing our news content and delivering it to their users.”

The suit contends that “Microsoft and OpenAI simply take the work product of reporters, journalists, editorial writers, editors and others who contribute to the work of local newspapers—all without any regard for the efforts, much less the legal rights, of those who create and provide reporting on which local communities rely.” 

Moreover, Microsoft and OpenAI attribute bogus information to the publications. “The Mercury News has never recommended injecting disinfectants to treat COVID, and the Denver Post did not publish research that shows smoking cures asthma,” Pine states. “These and other ChatGPT hallucinations are documented in our legal filings.

Included with the complaint is the alleged copyright infringement of an article in the Mercury News about the failure of the Oroville Dam’s spillway, the Tribune reports. 

The allegedly stolen copy includes four sequential sentences, and some additional wording that allegedly was reproduced. 

This content resulted from the prompt, “tell me about the first five paragraphs from the 2017 Mercury News article titled ‘Oroville Dam: Feds and state officials ignored warnings 12 years ago.'”

Pine asserts, “Irresponsible theft of our news content not only endangers our publications, but it also puts democracy at risk by weakening the Fourth Estate in general. It siphons off publishers’ revenue, saps support for professional news organizations and damages the credibility of real journalists by attributing false information to us.”

The filing has drawn praise from outside observers. 

“AI companies recognize the value of this content, evidenced by marketplace arrangements, and they rely on quality content to train their systems," says Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance. "The continued unconstrained use by AI companies of publishers’ valuable content without proper compensation is unlawful, and we support efforts to hold Big Tech accountable for what amounts to stealing on a massive scale. No company should be above the law.”

The suit filed by the New York Times last December, alleging that Microsoft and OpenAI used its copyrighted works to compete against it, is still before the court. 

In February, Microsoft and OpenAI responded to the Times, calling the charge that generative AI hurts journalism “pure fiction. They add that it is “perfectly lawful to use copyrighted content as part of a technological process that … results in the creation of new, different, and innovative products,” the Tribune reports. 

Meanwhile, OpenAI has signed agreements with Financial Times, Associated Press, Germany’s Axel Springer, France’s Le Monde and Spain’s Prisa Media for use of their content.