When news broke last year that AI heavyweight OpenAI and Axel Springer had reached a financial agreement and partnership, it seemed to bode well for harmony between folks who write words, and tech companies that use them to help create and train artificial intelligence models. At the time OpenAI had also come to an agreement with the AP, for reference.
Then as the year ended the New York Times sued OpenAI and its backer Microsoft, alleging that the AI company’s generative AI models were “built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more.” Due to what the Times considers to be “unlawful use of [its] work to create artificial intelligence products,” OpenAI’s “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style, as demonstrated by scores of examples.”