NYT accuses AIs of copyright infringement: Court case filed

On Wednesday, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement. According to The Times, these companies used millions of articles from the newspaper without permission to train chatbots that provide information to readers.

The newspaper's lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court, accuses the companies of trying to "take advantage of the NYT's vast investment in its journalism for free" to create alternative means of delivering information to readers.

"There is nothing 'transformative' about using Times content without payment to create products that replace the Times and distract audiences from it," the newspaper said.

OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment. They consider the use of copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence products to be "fair use."

Fair use is a legal doctrine that allows the use of copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder in certain cases.

The New York Times did not demand a specific amount of compensation for the damages, but the newspaper estimated them to be in the billions of dollars. It also demands that OpenAI and Microsoft destroy the training kits containing the newspaper's materials.

This year's negotiations between the newspaper and the defendants to reach a "mutually beneficial agreement" were unsuccessful.

Earlier Bill Gates, a U.S. entrepreneur and one of the founders of Microsoft, spoke about the future of artificial intelligence.