Seattle Times and Newsday are the latest publications to sue OpenAI and Microsoft
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that their journalism is being used without permission to train generative AI models. The plaintiffs argue that this practice threatens the sustainability of the news industry by creating derivative content that competes with the original sources.
Why it matters
This case represents a growing legal trend where media organizations are challenging the copyright practices of major AI developers, potentially setting a precedent for how AI companies compensate content creators.
Two more news organizations are suing OpenAI and Microsoft over the supposed use of their journalism to train AI.
A lawsuit filed by The Seattle Times and Newsday argued that with the advent of AI, the journalism industry could become “broken beyond repair.” The lawsuit described generative AI as “a snake eating its own tail” that could “destroy the very organizations” that produce the content it’s trained on.
“AI products like ChatGPT and CoPilot are touted as producers of content, but in fact they are rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations of that same original content they consumed to achieve their commercial objectives,” the lawsuit said.
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