A federal judge has ruled on Wednesday that media outlets including the New York Times can proceed with their lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, seeking an end to the practice of using their stories to train artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.
While District Judge Sidney Stein dismissed some of the claims made by the media organizations, the bulk of the case was allowed to proceed.
“We appreciate Judge Stein’s careful consideration of these issues,” New York Times attorney Ian Crosby said in a statement. “As the order indicates, all of our copyright claims will continue against Microsoft and Open AI for their widespread theft of millions of The Times’s works, and we look forward to continuing to pursue them.”
Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing said, “the claims the court has dismissed do not undermine the main thrust of our case, which is that these companies have stolen our work and violated our copyright in a way that fundamentally damages our business.”
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OpenAI said in a statement that it welcomed “the court’s dismissal of many of these claims” and looks forward “to making it clear that we build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner grounded in fair use, and supportive of innovation.”
This comes shortly after OpenAI’s rival Anthropic saw an early victory in a similar lawsuit. This copyright dispute was with several music publishers. The music publishers made a preliminary bid to block Anthropic from using lyrics owned by Universal Music Group (UMG), Concord, and ABKCO, which was rejected by a California federal judge, dealing a setback to the music industry’s efforts to regulate AI-generated content.
These lawsuits indicate the increasing relevance of questions surrounding copyright and fair use laws, especially when it pertains to artificial intelligence (AI). The outcomes of these copyright lawsuits will set a precedent for training AI models using publicly available data and shape future AI-related regulations. Along with OpenAI and Microsoft, companies such as Anthropic, Perplexity, and Google DeepMind are among those facing copyright litigation.