Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
Microsoft has accused The New York Times of “doomsday futurology” for predicting that ChatGPT could ruin the news business, as it seeks to dismiss a lawsuit that claims the artificial intelligence bot’s creator OpenAI engaged in copyright infringement.
In a motion filed to a Manhattan court, Microsoft, which has committed $13bn to OpenAI, likened the New York media organisation to Hollywood studios that sought to stop the introduction of the VCR in the 1980s, and hold back a “groundbreaking new technology”.
The NYT became the first big US media company to sue OpenAI and Microsoft over their AI chatbots in December, accusing the technology companies of unlawfully copying millions of articles to build the program.
The news organisation, which is seeking billions of dollars in damages, claimed the two groups had sought “to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment”.
But in its court brief on Monday, Microsoft argued that copyright law was “no more an obstacle to the [large language model] than it was to the VCR (or the player piano, copy machine, personal computer, internet, or search engine)” and maintained that content used to train tools like ChatGPT “does not supplant the market for the works”.
Lawyers for the tech group further claimed that examples of alleged copyright infringement detailed in the original complaint by the NYT were a series of “unrealistic prompts” that did not represent “how real-world people actually use the GPT-based tools at issue”.
“Nowhere does The Times allege that anyone other than its legal team would actually do any of this, and certainly not on a scale that merits the doomsday futurology it pushes before this court and has boosted to its readers,” they wrote.
OpenAI responded to the NYT lawsuit in January, claiming that it had “intentionally manipulated” its chatbot, tricking it into regurgitating whole lines from articles published by the newspaper.
The AI start-up, which had been in talks with the NYT to license its content, admitted it used the newspaper’s articles to develop its ChatGPT chatbot but said those had not “meaningfully contributed to the training of our existing models”. It blamed the regurgitations cited by the NYT on ChatGPT’s “inadvertent memorisation”.
In its own motion to dismiss filed last month, OpenAI also contended that “ChatGPT is not in any way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times” and that in “the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will”.
The NYT case is one of several lawsuits filed against ChatGPT’s creators and investors, including by bestselling authors such as John Grisham and Jodi Picoult. A case brought by comedian Sarah Silverman, among others, was partially dismissed by a judge in California last month.
Microsoft is OpenAI’s biggest backer after committing up to $13bn to fuel the company’s growth and provide the huge technical infrastructure needed to create its AI models. OpenAI’s GPT technology also underpins Microsoft’s Bing Chat, a feature within the software giant’s search engine.
In return, Microsoft is entitled to up to 49 per cent of the profits of OpenAI.