OpenAI submitted a motion in federal court on Monday seeking to dismiss key aspects of a lawsuit filed by The New York Times Company. The Times accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using its articles without permission to train A.I. technologies like ChatGPT, claiming that these technologies are now competing with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.
In response, the defendants argue that ChatGPT is not a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times and cannot be used to serve up Times articles at will. They claim that people do not use ChatGPT for that purpose in the real world.
OpenAI did not comment on the matter, and The Times Company has not responded to requests for comment. The motion filed by OpenAI seeks to dismiss four claims from The Times’s complaint, including acts of reproduction that occurred over three years ago and the allegation that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The lawsuit between The Times and OpenAI is the first of its kind involving a major American media company. OpenAI and other companies that develop generative A.I. technologies have faced copyright suits from various groups in the past.
OpenAI claims that they can legally use copyrighted material to train their systems without paying for it because the material is public and they are not reproducing it in its entirety. The Times provided examples of OpenAI’s technology reproducing excerpts from its articles, but OpenAI’s lawyers accused The Times of using deceptive tactics to elicit anomalous results.
The filing also argued that it was legal to use copyrighted material in its systems, citing legal precedents that allow for the use of copyrighted content “in the creation of new, different, and innovative products.”
“OpenAI and the other defendants in these lawsuits will ultimately prevail because no one — not even The New York Times — gets to monopolize facts or the rules of language,” the complaint said.
