OpenAI responded to a lawsuit by The New York Times, stating that it was “without merit” and that its use of copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence technologies is fair use under the law. The company said it collaborates with news organizations and supports the production of quality journalism. OpenAI also claimed that its technologies sometimes reproduce near-verbatim excerpts from articles, but it is working to address this issue. The Times, on the other hand, accused OpenAI and Microsoft of infringing on its copyrights by using millions of its articles to train A.I. technologies. The lawsuit highlighted examples showing ChatGPT reproducing excerpts from Times articles nearly word for word, which OpenAI acknowledged as a “rare bug” and against their terms of use. Other groups, including novelists and computer programmers, have also filed copyright suits against A.I. companies in light of the boom in “generative A.I.” technologies that generate text, images, and other media. The debate over the unauthorized use of published work to train A.I. technologies has sparked legal battles and discussions about the potential value of online information.
