This is the latest in a number of lawsuits that have accused OpenAI of taking content without permission to train ChatGPT.
Last week, The New York Times announced a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft alleging large-scale copyright infringement. They are accused of using millions of articles, without permission, to train ChatGPT to provide information to readers. The complaint accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of taking a “free-ride on the Times’s massive investment in its journalism” to create content that readers unwittingly use as a substitute for the Times’ original articles.
Why we care. Marketers face the prospect of needing to invest in generative AI to improve workflows, especially the content-creation workflows heavily reliant on large language models like ChatGPT. At the same time, it needs to be borne in mind that there is a realistic prospect that litigation (this is only one of a number of copyright infringement lawsuits) or regulation might at some point curb what the large language models can do.
Even marketers using proprietary tools like HubSpot’s ChatSpot are likely to be affected if plaintiffs prevail. While ChatSpot is trained by HubSpot to help perform tasks within the platform, its genAI component is powered by ChatGPT.
Of course, it will take the courts a long time to resolve the issues being raised.
The defense. OpenAI and Microsoft will argue that ChatGPT so transforms the content on which it is trained that appropriating the content constitutes “fair use.” The complaint by the Times, however, gives examples of near-verbatim reproductions of its content by ChatGPT.
The lawsuit comes after lengthy discussions between OpenAI and the Times. “We respect the rights of content creators and owners. Our ongoing conversations with the New York Times have been productive and moving forward constructively, so we are surprised and disappointed with this development,” said OpenAI in an email.
Kim Davis is currently editor at large at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Shortly thereafter he joined Third Door Media as Editorial Director at MarTech.
Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.
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