A new front in the legal struggle between news organisations fighting against the unauthorised use of their content on artificial intelligence platforms has emerged with the announcement that the Centre for Investigative Reporting (CIR) has filed lawsuits against OpenAI, and Microsoft, its closest business partner.
According to CIR’s lawsuit, the firms violated copyright, the organisation said in a press release.
The nonprofit that produces Mother Jones and Reveal claimed that OpenAI had violated copyrights on its journalism by using its content without authorization or payment.
The action, which was filed in a federal court in New York, centres on the threat that publishers face from AI-generated summaries of articles, a development that CIR deemed predatory.
“OpenAI and Microsoft started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more valuable, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organizations that license our material,” Monika Bauerlein, CEO of CIR, said in the release. “This free rider behaviour is not only unfair, it is a violation of copyright.”
In the press release, CIR stated that it has been registered for copyright for almost 50 years, that companies using artificial intelligence (AI) gain value as they access more information, and that publishers are at risk from AI summaries of articles.
“We are working collaboratively with the news industry and partnering with global news publishers to display their content in our products like ChatGPT, including summaries, quotes, and attribution, to drive traffic back to the original articles,” the statement said.
“A component of the partnerships is the ability to leverage publisher content using various machine learning and training techniques to help us optimize the display of that content and make it more useful to users.”
Some media organizations like News Corp. have chosen to collaborate enabling OpenAI to access both live and past content from News Corp.’s publications rather than fight.
In May, Reddit also declared that it would collaborate with OpenAI, enabling the latter to use Reddit material.
