Eight US newspaper publishers file lawsuit against Microsoft, OpenAI for copyright infringement

Eight American newspaper publishers have lodged a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing the companies of unauthorised usage of their articles in artificial intelligence products.

The publishers, which operate major newspapers including the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, allege that Microsoft's Copilot assistant and OpenAI's ChatGPT have been using their copyrighted articles without permission or payment.

The lawsuit was filed in a New York federal court on Tuesday. The publishers also claim that OpenAI's large language models, GPT-2 and GPT-3, have been trained on data sets containing text from their newspapers.

These models can generate text based on human input and reportedly produce near-verbatim copies of the publishers' works. The lawsuit also alleges that Microsoft uses information from their newspapers for its Bing search index, but does not always provide links to the original articles. This challenge follows a similar lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI four months ago.