News outlets urge a judge to sanction OpenAI in a high-stakes AI copyright fight
NEW YORK: The New York Times, the Daily News and other media outlets are asking a federal judge to impose sanctions on OpenAI, escalating a fight over artificial intelligence and copyright that could shape the future of a struggling news industry.
The newspapers allege the ChatGPT maker is hiding evidence important to what could be a landmark copyright infringement trial over how OpenAI and its business partner, Microsoft, built their AI technologies using millions of news articles. At issue is whether AI chatbots are unfairly competing as an information source, siphoning off web traffic without doing the journalistic work involved in gathering the news.
A filing on Thursday in a Manhattan federal courthouse alleges OpenAI “chose obstruction” over releasing datasets and ChatGPT logs that could show how the AI system used copyrighted news content. The plaintiffs are asking the judge to penalise the company for “discovery misconduct” that could distort evidence, saying the recent deposition of an OpenAI employee contradicts the company’s earlier claims.
New York Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said OpenAI has been “making misrepresentations” for two years about its ability to search for copyrighted content in its AI training datasets and logs.
“This motion asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism,” said Lieberman, who represents the Daily News and seven of its sister papers.
OpenAI has described its limitations in sharing ChatGPT logs as a measure to protect user privacy.
“As the Times’ case weakens and they’ve been forced to drop claims against us, they’re persisting with their efforts to invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case, including by making these blatantly false allegations,” said a statement on Thursday from OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri. “We’ll continue defending our users’ privacy and the long‑established principles of fair use.”
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, about a year after ChatGPT’s debut sparked a commercial AI boom and began changing the way people search for information online. The threat to news publications became even more apparent when Google in 2024 introduced AI‑generated summaries at the top of online search results, cutting off the advertising revenue that comes when people click a link to the information’s original source.
By RSS/AP
