Newspapers fight back, file suit against OpenAI

Eight major newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Tuesday in federal court, alleging copyright infringement. The group includes major regional newspapers, such as the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel.

While many publishers have struck lucrative licensing deals with AI companies, allowing them to train their large language models by scraping their websites, others have opted for litigation, most notably the New York Times. The Grey Lady sued OpenAI in December, alleging the Sam Altman-led startup violated federal copyright law by illegally training its model on Times journalism and spitting out responses indistinguishable from what people can find on their website or in their print newspaper. OpenAI has said the suit is “without merit.”

The Alden group also followed the Times' lead in suing Microsoft, too. Microsoft is OpenAI's biggest investor, having poured $13 billion into the startup, and uses the GPT suite of language models in its Copilot assistant and Bing search products.

If a large language model proprietor is found to have violated copyright statutes, it could pose an existential threat to that model — meaning it may have to start training a new one from scratch.