Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies used hundreds of thousands of their articles to build AI products without permission or compensation. The suit was filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The newspapers claim the tech companies scraped their websites, including content behind paywalls, to create training datasets for large language models powering ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing AI. Their argument boils down to a simple premise: if an AI can spit out a close approximation of an article, why would anyone bother visiting the newspaper’s website or paying for a subscription? What the newspapers are asking for The plaintiffs aren’t just looking for a check. They want monetary damages and the destruction of the infringing datasets and AI models built from their content. The complaint highlights an 88-word excerpt from the Seattle Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX as one example of the alleged infringement. According to the suit, the AI systems were able to reproduce the passage in near-verbatim form. Seattle Times President Alan Fisco ac...