A group of US news organisations is taking ChapGPT’s parent company OpenAI to federal court and the hearing on Tuesday (Jan 14) will determine the fate of the AI giant faced with a massive copyright infringement case.

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The Times, The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting are leading the legal campaign against OpenAI and its backer Microsoft. The cases against the two entities have now been merged into one.

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The hearing on Tuesday will decide whether OpenAI’s plea to dismiss the trial will get approval or the news organisations will be allowed to pursue the case further.

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Arguments of news publishers

The news organisations argue that ChatGPT was fed with millions of copyrighted works from their websites, including archives, for training purposes and it was done without consent or remuneration. According to the publishers, this data scraping amounts to copyright infringement on a massive scale.

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"[OpenAI's] unlawful use of The Times's work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times's ability to provide that service," the newspaper's attorneys wrote in an amended complaint filed in August 2023.

"Using the valuable intellectual property of others in these ways without paying for it has been extremely lucrative for [OpenAI]."

Argument by OpenAI and Microsoft

On the contrary, attorneys for Microsoft argue that using journalistic text for training an AI model was not illegal.

"In this case, The New York Times uses its might and its megaphone to challenge the latest profound technological advance: the Large Language Model, or LLM," wrote the lawyers in their court filing.

Earlier, other news publishers, including the Associated Press, News Corp. and Vox Media, struck a deal with OpenAI over content-sharing. But the Times and company are going full offensive, who argue that ChatGPT's dataset must be deleted and billions should be paid in damages.

(With inputs from agencies)