‘Billions of Dollars’: New York Times Sues Open AI, Warns the Technology Could Result In Huge Sums of Lost Revenue

CNN’s Clare Duffy reported on the New York Times’s lawsuit against OpenAI on Wednesday and highlighted how the litigation reflects “this larger fight over how the future of the internet will be built.”

“New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly using millions of articles published by the Times to train automated chatbots, which now compete with the Times as sources of information. Open AI, of course, is the company behind ChatGPT,” began anchor Boris Sanchez before Duffy was introduced.

“There have been all of these concerns, especially among journalists, about AI stealing our jobs, and the New York Times is now fighting back against this,” Duffy began, adding:

The Times is claiming that millions of its copyrighted works were used by Microsoft and OpenAI to train their large language models. These huge datasets, the power AI tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot. The Times claims that because their articles were used to train these tools, the tools can now produce responses that mimic Times journalism, or in some cases repeats it verbatim. There’s one example in the complaint that I think we can pull up for you here, where a ChatGPT user goes to the chatbot saying that they hit the Times paywall and couldn’t read a 2012 Pulitzer Prize winning Times article. In response, ChatGPT provided the user with the first three paragraphs of that story.

Now, the Times worries that technology like this will remove the need for readers to go to its website and pay for subscriptions, potentially harming its business to the tune of billions of dollars. The Times says in its complaint that by providing Times content without the Times’s permission or authorization, these AI tools undermine and damage the Times’s relationship with its readers and deprive the Times of subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue.

Now, the Times says that it spent months negotiating with Microsoft and OpenAI to try to come to an agreement for how it could be compensated for the use of its journalism. But at the time that the companies failed to come to a fair deal. And now, taking a step back here, I mean, this really does reflect this larger fight over how the future of the internet will be built. On one hand, you have companies like Microsoft and OpenAI who say that their AI tools are essential for the future and that they need to train them on high quality sources if we want them to work well and be reliable. But the Times here is saying, not so fast. We need to come to an agreement for how we can be compensated so that our work isn’t compromised here.

“Yeah. Just one aspect of how AI is going to disrupt everything,” Sanchez concluded before moving on.

Watch the full clip above via CNN.

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