AI faces toughest legal threat yet

The Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT tool, for copyright infringement shortly before the new year, alleging the companies impermissibly to train their AI models. The newspaper who have sued major technology companies in recent months for training AI on their copyrighted work without permission.

Many of these lawsuits have hit road bumps in court. However, experts believe The Times’s complaint is sharper than earlier AI related copyright suits. “I think they have learned from some of the previous losses,” Robert Brauneis, a professor of intellectual property law at the George Washington University Law School, told The Hill.

The Times lawsuit is “a little bit less scattershot in their causes of action,” Brauneis said. “The attorneys here for the New York Times are careful to avoid just kind of throwing up everything against the wall and seeing what sticks there,” he added. “They’re really concentrated on what they think will stick.” In its suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, the Times alleges the AI models developed by the companies have and can sometimes reproduce chunks of the newspaper’s articles.

“If individuals can access The Times’s highly valuable content through Defendants’ own products without having to pay for it and without having to navigate through The Times’s paywall, many will likely do so,” the lawsuit reads. Earlier copyright lawsuits haven’t been able to show such by AI models, said Shabbi Khan, co chair for the Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and Robotics group at law firm Foley & Lardner.

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