OpenAI filed a motion in federal court on Monday that seeks to dismiss some key elements of a lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company.
The Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft on December 27, accusing them of infringing its copyright by using millions of its articles to train artificial intelligence technologies such as the online chatbot ChatGPT. Chatbots are now competing with the news outlet as a source of reliable information, the lawsuit said.
In the lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the defendants argue that ChatGPT is “in no way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times.”
“In the real world, people don’t use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product for this purpose,” the filing said. “Neither could they. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to view Times articles at will.”
OpenAI declined to comment, and the Times did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The motion asked the court to dismiss four claims from the Times’ complaint to narrow the focus of the lawsuit. OpenAI’s lawyers argued that the Times should not be allowed to sue for acts of reproduction that occurred more than three years ago and that the paper’s claim that OpenAI violated the Digital Age Copyright Act, an amendment to the law US Copyright Act passed in 1998 after the rise of the internet was not legally sound.
The Times was the first major US media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Novelists, computer programmers and other groups have also filed copyright lawsuits against the start-up and other companies building genetic artificial intelligence, technologies that generate text, images and other media from short messages.
Like other AI companies, OpenAI built its technology by feeding it vast amounts of digital data, some of which is likely copyrighted. AI companies have claimed that they can legally use such material to train their systems without paying for it because it is public and they do not reproduce the material in its entirety.
In its suit, the Times included examples of OpenAI’s technology that reproduces excerpts from its articles almost verbatim. In the motion to dismiss, OpenAI’s lawyers accused the Times of paying someone to hack its chatbot. “It took them tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results,” the motion said.
“They were only able to do this by targeting and exploiting a bug (which OpenAI has committed to addressing) using misleading messages that flagrantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use,” the filing said.
The filing also argued that it was legal to use copyrighted material on its systems, citing legal precedents that allow copyrighted content to be used “in the creation of new, different and innovative products.”
“OpenAI and the other defendants in these lawsuits will ultimately prevail because no one — not even The New York Times — can monopolize facts or the rules of language,” the complaint said.
