OpenAI said monday that a lawsuit filed against him by the New York Times was “meritless” and that he supported and created opportunities for news organizations as he waded into a debate over unauthorized use of published works to train artificial intelligence technologies.
On December 27, the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of violating their copyrights by using millions of their articles to train AI technologies like the ChatGPT chatbot. Chatbots now rival the Times as a reliable news source, according to the lawsuit.
In a 1,000-word blog post published Monday, OpenAI said it has been working with news organizations and has formed partnerships with some of them, including the Associated Press. Using copyrighted works to form its technologies constitutes fair use under the law, the company added. The Times’ lawsuit doesn’t tell the whole story of how OpenAI and its technologies work, he said.
“We look forward to continuing our collaboration with news organizations, helping them increase their ability to produce quality journalism by realizing the transformative potential of AI,” the company wrote.
Lindsey Held, an OpenAI spokesperson, declined further comment.
The Times was the first major U.S. media organization to sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright issues related to its written works. Other groups, including novelists and computer programmers, have also filed copyright lawsuits against AI companies. The lawsuits have been spurred by the rise of “generative AI,” technologies that generate text, images and other media from short prompts.
OpenAI and other AI companies are building this technology by feeding it massive amounts of digital data, some of which is likely copyrighted. This led us to realize that information online – stories, illustrations, news articles, forum posts and photos – can have considerable untapped value.
AI companies have long claimed that they can legally use this content to train their technologies without paying for it, because the material is public and they don’t reproduce it in its entirety.
In its blog post, OpenAI said its discussions with the Times about a potential partnership appeared to be progressing constructively, with last communication on December 19. During the negotiations, he said the Times mentioned seeing OpenAI’s technology “regurgitate.” some of its content – meaning the technology had generated near-verbatim excerpts from articles that appeared in the Times – but declined to provide examples. When the Times filed suit eight days later, OpenAI said it was surprised and disappointed.
The Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI said its technology sometimes regurgitates articles, but that this is a “rare bug” that it is working to resolve. The Times’ lawsuit included examples of ChatGPT reproducing excerpts from its articles almost verbatim.
“Intentionally manipulating our models to regurgitate them is not an appropriate use of our technology and goes against our terms of service,” OpenAI said.
