Microsoft and OpenAI are being sued again by the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News

A group of posts that include Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and on Orlando Sentinel are suing Microsoft and OpenAI, as reported by On the edge. The eight publications in this particular lawsuit, all owned by Alden Capital Group (ACG), accuse the companies of “stealing millions” of their copyrighted articles “without permission and without payment to drive the commercialization of their AI generative products. intelligence including ChatGPT and co-pilot.”

This is just the latest lawsuit filed against Microsoft and OpenAI for their use of copyrighted material without the express consent of the publishers. New York Times also filed a lawsuit against the companies late last year, claiming they used “nearly a century of copyrighted content.” Their products may regurgitate Times’ articles verbatim and may “mimic his expressive style,” the publication said, although they did not have a prior licensing agreement. In a motion to dismiss key parts of the lawsuit, Microsoft accused times of doomsday futurology, arguing that generative AI could pose a threat to independent journalism.

ACG papers complain of the same thing, that companies’ chatbots reproduce their articles word for word shortly after they are published with no apparent link to the sources. They included several examples in their complaint. Also, the chatbots apparently suffer from hallucinations and attribute inaccurate reports to ACG posts. The publisher claims the defendants pay for the computers, specialized chips and electricity they use to build and run their generative AI products. Yet they use copyrighted articles “without permission and without paying for the privilege” even though they need content to train their large language models. The plaintiffs cited OpenAI’s previous admission that it would be “impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted material.”

OpenAI is no longer a for-profit company, the plaintiffs said, and is now valued at $90 billion. Meanwhile, ChatGPT and Copilot added “hundreds of billions of dollars to Microsoft’s market value.” The publications are seeking an unspecified amount in damages and are asking the court to order the defendants to destroy the GPT and LLM models that use their material.