• by Ray Schultz , February 29, 2024

OpenAI, which has responded vigorously to a copyright infringement suit filed by The New York Times, is facing two new lawsuits.  

The Intercept, a newsroom devoted to adversarial journalism, filed one. Raw Media and Alternet Media, which have missions similar to that of The Intercept, instituted the other.  

The Intercept complaint charges that OpenAI “intentionally removed author, title, copyright notice, and terms of use information from Plaintiff’s copyrighted works in creating ChatGPT training sets.” 

This violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which prohibits “the removal of author, title, copyright, and terms of use information from protected works where there is reason to know that it would, facilitate copyright infringement," it continues.

Microsoft did the same as part of its effort to develop ChatGPT, the suit contends.  

If it comes to trial, there doubtless will be a lengthy period of discovery. 

The complaint acknowledges that the allegations are based on “an extensive review of publicly available information regarding earlier versions of ChatGPT and consultations with a data scientist employed by Plaintiff’s counsel to analyze that information and provide insights into the manner in which AI is developed and functions.” 

As to why this is so, the filing alleges that the defendants “have kept secret the specific content used to train all versions of ChatGPT.” 

The suit seeks damages and an injunction requiring the defendants to remove all of The Intercept’s copyrighted works from which author, copyright and other details are missing, from their training sets. 

The Raw Media and Alternet Media suit is just about identical.  

Meanwhile, OpenAI has answered the Times complaint that was filed late last year, alleging that “the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI's products.” 

OpenAI also claims that it took “tens of thousands of attempts” to produce the “highly anomalous” results that the Times cited as examples of OpenAI displaying large portions of articles in response to prompts by users.

For its part, the Times claims that OpenAI used its articles to train chatbots and that it recited large portions of articles in response to queries.  

The Times suit states that the defendants “utilized large-language models (LLMs) “that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more.”

All the cases are on file with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.