A group of eight US newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and Denver Post, has lodged a lawsuit against ChatGPT developer OpenAI and financial backer Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT), accusing them of harvesting copyrighted content to train their AI-driven chatbots.
Frank Pine, the executive editor for both MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, stated: "We’ve spent billions of dollars gathering information and reporting news at our publications, and we can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense.”
Included in the lawsuit are other newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital such as Mercury News, Orange County Register, and the St Paul Pioneer-Press.
It marks another saga in the contentious area of data scraping for training large-language models.
Last December, the New York Times also targeted OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright issues concerning AI development.
Earlier this week, social media platform Reddit (NYSE:RDDT) warned technology companies that they will face legal action if found extracting data from the website without official permission.
OpenAI inked a deal with the Financial Times allowing the AI firm to train its models, including ChatGPT, using FT's archived content.