On Wednesday, the New York Times filed a copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and Open AI, the first of its kind from a renowned American news outlet, under the allegations of unfair competition that threatens the free press society. 

The NYT demanded “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages for their unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works,” from a Manhattan court where the case is being held, adding that the defendants destroy the chatbot models that have used their material as it is copyrighted. 

It was argued that the defendants have been utilizing the NYT's massive investment in journalistic pursuit, without paying forward for the material, to sway audiences away from the Times and closer to their content. 

Moreover, it was also stated that Microsoft has made substantial investments, 13 billion dollars to be precise, into Open AI, and infused it with their personal search engine Bing. Consequentially, Bing, powered with Open AI, has resulted in content “reproduced almost verbatim” from the Times but had not credited the news outlet, to boost revenue. 

NEWS: The NY Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over Use of Copyrighted Work

Lawsuit claims that Millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it pic.twitter.com/UAeyznJBfD

— X News Daily (@xDaily) December 27, 2023

No response from Microsoft

According to NYT, their content was particularly put to use because of the "reliability and accuracy of material."

“If The Times and other news organizations cannot produce and protect their independent journalism, there will be a vacuum that no computer or artificial intelligence can fill. Less journalism will be produced, and the cost to society will be enormous,” the lawsuit claimed. 

The journal had tried to resolve the issue with Open AI and Microsoft back in April but in vain. In comparison, other media outlets, like the Associated Press, and Axel Springer, the owner of Business Insider and Politico, have previously reached agreements with Open AI that allow the intelligence bot to recycle their content. 

So far, no response has been given from Microsoft and Open AI's side. 

The NYT is being represented by Susman Godfrey, a firm that is linked to another lawsuit against Microsoft and Open AI, filed just last month. Susman Godfrey also represented Dominion Voting Systems in a defamation case against Fox News during their coverage of the 2020 US elections.

Read more: OpenAI staff threatens to quit unless board resigns

Open AI as an alternative to human-productions

NYT's claim of Open AI and Microsoft disregarding billions of dollars of investments in human-produced journalism was not a mere accusation. Studies have previously shown that readers are more inclined to believe AI-produced content.

In a study conducted in July, people were found to be more inclined to trust content produced by OpenAI's GPT-3 model in a study that contrasted tweets produced by humans with those produced by AI.

Unexpectedly, the test's findings showed that, regardless of how accurate the information was, people preferred tweets written by AI because they seemed more credible.

After testing its participants, a study published in the Science Advances journal asserted that artificial intelligence (AI) produces reliable and engaging social media content more effectively than humans.

Participants found it challenging to distinguish between tweets created by real Twitter users and those created by the AI tool when the researchers presented them with various tweets produced by humans and GPT-3.