There was a rift between Microsoft and The New York Times as NYT sued the tech giant for plagiarism.
Big tech giant Microsoft has accused The New York Times of “doomsday futurology” as they predicted that Chat GPT will ruin the news business. This came in front when Microsoft seemed to dismiss a lawsuit that claimed that Chat GPT’s creator Open AI has to face a copyright infringement.
The lawsuit was filed in a Manhattan Court, Microsoft who had committed $13bn to OpenAI got sued by The New York Times as it claimed that Chat GPT used its articles to learn and also displayed it to its users. This caused this huge US media company to lose many of its subscribers. As they could read the same article using Chat GPT for free.
It also claimed that chat GPT used its machine learning technology and learned from the articles published on The New York Times website. This big media company is the first media organization that has sued OpenAI for copyright issues. In this lawsuit, The New York Times is claiming billions of dollars as Chat GPT has used information that has been earned from investing time and money in the field of journalism.
The suit started in December when The New York Times claimed that the technology had used its information without permission and also copied articles in order to build and educate the program. But, in courts brief on Monday, Microsoft argues that the copyright lawsuit was “no more an obstacle to the [large language model] than it was to the VCR (or the player piano, copy machine, personal computer, internet, or search engine)” and also said that the content used to train Chat GPT “does not supplant the market for the works.”
The lawyers of Microsoft also claimed that the examples of the alleged copyright infringement detailed in the original complaint by The Times were a series of “unrealistic prompts” that did not represent “how real-world people actually use the GPT-based tools at issue.” They also added “Nowhere does The Times allege that anyone other than its legal team would actually do any of this, and certainly not a scale that merits the doomsday futurology it pushes before this court and has boosted to its readers,”
OpenAI responded to The Times claiming that it had “intentionally manipulated” its chatbot which led the algorithm to copy some lines of the articles of the newspaper. It also said that OpenAI was in talks with the newspaper for licensing its content. They admitted that they had used the articles to develop ChatGPT but also denied that they “meaningfully contributed to the training of our existing models”. They blamed the regulations said by The Times on ChatGPT’s “inadvertent memorization”.
In an attempt to dismiss filed last month, OpenAI argued that “ChatGPT is not in any way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times” and that in “the ordinary course one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Time articles at will.” A statement was issued in response to Microsoft‘s Monday filing, a lawyer of The Times Ian Crosby, said that the tech giant “oddly compares [Large Language Models] to the VCR even though VCR makers never argued that it was necessary to engage in massive copyright infringement to build their products. The bottom line is that The Times looked for its stolen works and found them. Microsoft now blames The Times for bringing this to light as an excuse for their and OpenAI’s wrongdoing.”
The New York Times case is one of the cases filed against OpenAI and its investors. The list includes bestselling authors like John Grisham and Jodi Picoult. There was case that was partially dismissed by a judge in California last month. The case was filed by comedian Sarah Silverman.
Microsoft is one of the biggest investors after committing up to $13bn to financially support the company’s growth by providing huge technical infrastructure to create AI models. In return for this investment Microsoft is entitled to 49 per cent of the profits of OpenAI.