The future of media, artificial intelligence, and U.S. copyright law could all hang in the balance.
When a generative artificial intelligence (AI) system outputs something strikingly similar to the data it was trained on, is it copyright infringement or a bug in the system? This is the question at the heart of the New York Times’ recent lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
The Times alleges that OpenAI used more content from the NYT website to train its AI models than nearly any other proprietary source — with only Wikipedia and datasets containing U.S. patent documents trumping it.
OpenAI says training on copyrighted data is “fair use” and the New York Times’ lawsuit is “without merit.”
