The coming years will be filled with key court decisions to determine whether developers of generative artificial intelligence systems have illegally used writings, drawings, voices, images, artwork, comments or videos posted online on the Internet by professionals or users. Material used to train their algorithms without the permission of its creators and sometimes protected by copyright. In this competition, the first victory was won by OpenAI.
A federal judge in New York has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the editors of two independent media outlets, Raw Story and AlterNet, who alleged the artificial intelligence company made illegitimate use of their articles. They point out that OpenAI removed authorship and title information from thousands of its news stories, as well as the fact that they were copyrighted, allowing ChatGPT to replicate and redistribute them.
An activity which, according to them, was carried out without the express authorization of its original creators and without obtaining profits which went into their own coffers. “When a user asks ChatGPT about a news event or the results of investigative journalism, ChatGPT will provide answers that mimic the copyrighted journalistic works that covered those events,” the publishers cited as evidence.
“ChatGPT has no independent knowledge of the information provided in your responses. Instead, to serve Defendants’ paying customers, ChatGPT repackages, among other materials, copyrighted journalistic work products developed by Plaintiffs and others at their expense,” they added.
The lawsuit sought compensation for damages to the media and a court order to remove content from ChatGPT’s training sets. However, the judge closed the door on this option for the time being, stating that the media was unable to demonstrate the harm that ChatGPT had caused them to support the lawsuit. “Without concrete damage, there is no legitimization,” he said.
The judge explains that the large amount of information used in ChatGPT training means that the likelihood of the program reproducing the content of the plaintiffs’ articles is very low. “When a user enters a question into ChatGPT, this AI synthesizes relevant information from its repository into an answer. Given the amount of information contained in the repository, the likelihood that ChatGPT produced content plagiarized from any of the plaintiffs’ articles appears low,” the decision states.
However, the ruling gives Raw Story and AlterNet another opportunity to try again with solid evidence of the “substantial risk” that the current version of ChatGPT generates responses plagiarizing their articles, and the “concrete harm” this causes to your business. Cautioning them, of course, that she is “skeptical” of their ability to “claim recognizable damages” based on what has been seen so far.
The plaintiffs’ lawyer said he was “confident” in his ability to “address the concerns identified by the court through an amended complaint” in statements to Reuters.
OpenAI, for its part, emphasized the legitimacy of its actions to form ChatGPT. “We build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by long-standing and widely accepted legal precedents,” a spokesperson emphasized. in a statement sent to this media. Earlier this year, the company acknowledged that it would have been “impossible” to train ChatGPT while respecting copyright.
Bigger rivals on the horizon
Raw Story and AlterNet are two independent American media outlets with a progressive line and have a similar audience, although a little larger in absolute figures for the first (around five million monthly readers). Raw Story acquired Alternet in 2018 to form a shared media company for both platforms. John Byrne, founder of Raw Story, argued at the event that “news organizations need to stand up to OpenAI” for using “the hard work of journalists whose jobs are under siege.”
OpenAI has other, more important processes ahead of it than the one involving Raw Story and AlterNet, although it could set a precedent in terms of judges assessing the actual harm AI companies have caused to rights holders. The biggest challenge for the media industry is surely the lawsuit filed by the New York Times against OpenAI itself and Microsoft.
The Times’ arguments are similar to those of Raw Story and AlterNet. The prestigious journal claims that OpenAI and Microsoft are taking advantage of the journal’s intellectual property by using it to generate content that competes with the original articles, which could potentially reduce the journal’s traffic and revenue. Although the lawsuit does not specify an exact amount, it seeks compensation of several billion dollars for this illicit use of its content.
Evidence presented by the Times in the process showed that it is also asking companies to stop using its articles in their training data and destroy any AI models built with the material.
OpenAI is also being sued by the American Authors Union, to which writers like George RR Martin (song of ice and fire). They denounced the “systematic theft” of their works by the company that created ChatGPT, already valued at $157 billion after completing the largest venture capital funding round in history.
Agreements with other publishers
Perhaps to avoid further legal issues, OpenAI has also signed significant agreements with news publishers to access their content and use it in training its artificial intelligence models. Among the most notable agreements are that with the Associated Press (AP), one of the largest in the world; with or News Corp, owner of hundreds of media such as the Wall Street Journal or the Times.
OpenAI also signed an exclusive partnership with Spanish media group Prisa in March this year, giving ChatGPT access to content published by El País, Cinco Días, AS and El HuffPost. “Joining forces with OpenAI opens up new avenues for us to reach our audiences. Taking advantage of ChatGPT’s capabilities allows us to present our in-depth, quality journalism in innovative formats, reaching people looking for rigorous, independent content. This is a definitive step towards the future of information, where technology and human experience merge to enrich the reader experience,” said Carlos Núñez, Executive Chairman and CEO of Prisa.
