8 major newspapers join legal backlash against OpenAI, Microsoft

In a move that underscores escalating tensions between the news industry and artificial intelligence developers, a coalition of eight leading daily newspapers on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against tech giants OpenAI and Microsoft.

The legal action, initiated by the Chicago Tribune, New York’s Daily News and the six others, all owned by Alden Global Capital, claims the use of copyrighted articles to train AI technologies, notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is unauthorized.

The publishers argue that their content has been instrumental in developing and refining AI tools without fair compensation, raising concerns about the potential impact on the news industry’s viability, according to The Washington Post.

At the heart of this dispute is copyrighted material fed into AI algorithms. Tech firms, including Microsoft, Google and OpenAI, have utilized vast amounts of data from the internet, including news stories, to enhance their AI models. The models power products like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, which have not disclosed the specifics of their data sources, though it’s known that news articles have played a significant role.

“They pay their engineers and programmers, they pay for servers and processors, they pay for electricity and they definitely get paid from their astronomical valuations, but they don’t want to pay for the content, without which they would have no product at all,” said Frank Pine, executive editor for the two Alden groups that oversee the eight newspapers, MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, The Post reported. “That’s not fair use, and it’s not fair. It needs to stop.”

One AI group pushed back. “We take great care in our products and design process to support news organizations,” said Kayla Wood, an OpenAI spokeswoman. “We are actively engaged in constructive partnerships and conversations with many news organizations around the world.”