THE NEW YORK TIMES has become the first big media organization to sue OpenAI over copyright infringement. The lawsuit claims OpenAI has been trained on content it produced, and now competes with them using the results. It claims OpenAI should be liable for billions in statutory and actual damages, giving examples of ChatGPT quoting and paraphrasing copyright material.
The ire of the New York Times is understandable, but can this go anywhere? Copyright laws are lagging behind the rapid development of AI, and there’s no clear precedence. The whole AI industry has been lax over where it gets training material. Haphazardly scraping it off the internet means masses of copyright material has been fed into the machine, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the output looks suspiciously familiar. Purging the models of such material would be impossible—besides, it needs masses of recent data to be useful. Some sort of compromise will have to be reached. But right or wrong, suing a company with pockets as deep as Microsoft has is a tough job.