Syed Imran Haider 
The news industry has been gearing up to take on OpenAI and it has now gained a powerful ally to assist in the matter.
The oldest nonprofit newsroom in the US, the Center for Investigative Reporting, filed a lawsuit in federal court against, Open AI and its champion, Microsoft.
The lawsuit
The CIR has accused the companies of copyright infringement. Lawsuits from other publications such as the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and The New York Times have also alleged the same.
According to the CIR, OpenAI had not obtained its authorization or permission before it displayed, copied and abridged their content. Moreover, the company had not compensated CIR in any way.
OpenAI launched its ChatGPT chatbot publicly in late 2022. To respond to user queries, it crawls the web for answers and relies heavily on news stories for this purpose.
The plaintiffs said that the defendants had a choice to respect the works of journalism when they used them in their training sets. However, they had chosen not to show any respect.
The CIR’s CEO, Monika Bauerlein, said in a press release that the defendants had displayed free rider behavior.
The allegations
The chief executive said that Microsoft and OpenAI had made their product more powerful with their stories. Most importantly, they had done so without asking for permission.
Likewise, they had not offered any compensation, while other organizations that license CIR’s material do compensate it.
The CIR also said in the lawsuit that ChatGPT had been trained to not show any respect to copyright. It said that they had done so without permission.
According to the group, they want the defendants’ profits and damages as well. They said they would accept statutory damages of about $750 for every work they have infringed.
They also want $2,500 for every DMCA violation i.e. the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The response
A spokesperson for OpenAI said that they were collaborating with the news industry. They said that the company has also entered into partnerships with global news publishers.
This would allow them to display their content in their products like ChatGPT. These include attributions, quotes and summaries and it would help boost traffic to the original sources.
The spokesperson said that the partnership included using publisher content for various training and machine learning techniques.
This would help OpenAI optimize the content and make it more useful. The news industry is struggling to keep up with its operations.
A number of publications have gotten rather aggressive because they want to protect their businesses due to the rising prevalence of AI-generated content.
The New York Times had sued OpenAI and Microsoft back in December, accusing them of violating intellectual property.
The publication said that it was seeking damages, both actual and statutory, worth billions of dollars for using their works.
A similar lawsuit had been filed by eight publications in April, which includes The Chicago Tribune. A group of prominent authors also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last year.
