NEW YORK: A group of newspapers, including the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune, sued Microsoft and OpenAI in a federal court on Tuesday, accusing them of misusing reporters’ work to train their generative artificial-intelligence systems.

The eight newspapers, owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group, said in the lawsuit that the companies unlawfully copied millions of their articles to train AI products, including Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The complaint follows similar ongoing lawsuits against Microsoft and OpenAI, which has received billions in financial backing from Microsoft, brought by the New York Times and news outlets The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet.

An OpenAI spokesperson said the company takes “great care in our products and design process to support news organisations”.

The newspaper cases are among several potential landmark lawsuits brought by copy­right owners against tech companies over the data used to train their generative AI systems.

A lawyer for the MediaNews publications, Steven Lieberman, said OpenAI owed its runaway success to the works of others. The defendants know they have to pay for computers, chips, and employee salaries, but “think somehow they can get away with taking content” without permission or payment, he said.

The lawsuit said Microsoft and OpenAI’s systems reproduce the newspapers’ copyrighted content “verbatim” when prompted. It said ChatGPT also “hallucinates” articles attributed to the newspapers that harm their reputation, including a fake Denver Post article touting smoking as an asthma cure and a bogus Chicago Tribune recommendation for an infant lounger that was recalled after being linked to child deaths.

The plaintiffs also include the Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and Twin Cities Pioneer Press.

Published in Dawn, May 1st, 2024