Tech giant Microsoft and its generative AI partner OpenAI are now famous for their chatbots ChatGPT and Copilot According to The Verge, three American news websites, Raw Story, The Intercept and AlterNet, filed lawsuits against the two companies, accusing their chatbots of plagiarizing news website articles for training.
These news sites all said that OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT (Microsoft's Copilot also uses this technology) plagiarized articles on their websites during training and did not display "author, title,copyrightor terms of use information". Alternet and Raw Story argue that if people were aware that ChatGPT was infringing the copyright of their articles, the chatbot wouldn't be so popular. They also point out that website owners can ask OpenAI not to scrape their website content to train ChatGPT, suggesting that both OpenAI and Microsoft are aware that ChatGPT may infringe copyright.
In December 2023, the New York Times also filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing ChatGPT of illegally using its "millions of published articles." However, this week OpenAI filed a counterclaim, accusing the New York Times of hiring others to illegally hack into its service and use fake text prompt vulnerabilities to manipulate chatbots to generateNews AgencyContents of the response presented in the original lawsuit.
A legal battle between Microsoft and OpenAI and news organizations over the legality of content sourcing is about to begin, with the outcome of the case set to determine whether news sites have the right to exclude their stories from generative AI services.