The most influential newspaper in the world, 'The New York Times', on Wednesday opened a path that can change the future of generative artificial intelligence, although no one can predict the future now.
The newspaper that best adapted to the shock that the Internet brought to traditional newsrooms in the 90s of the last century, which today has a base of 10 million subscribers around the world and hopes to reach 15 million paying readers in three years, he has sued OpenAI and Microsoft because he claims that they have benefited from his intellectual property protected texts without paying anything in return. A devastating example. The letter to the judge has 100 like this. The movement of the New York newspaper is striking due to the importance of the medium, but the revolution of creators against the AI models that are trained with their works without paying anything in return is a new trend that can lead to a chain of complaints.
A significant piece of information about the Times' move is that it has hired the law firm Susman Godfrey as lead outside counsel for the litigation with Microsoft and OpenAI. This is the same legal firm that represented the electronic voting systems company Dominion Voting Systems in a lawsuit against the ultra-conservative Fox News network, which questioned its electronic voting systems, and which resulted in compensation last April of 787.5 million dollars. But that's not why the Times hired them. The firm filed a class-action lawsuit in November against Microsoft and OpenAI on behalf of fiction authors whose books and other copyrighted works were used to train their large artificial intelligence models.
In that lawsuit, Susman Godfrey's attorneys accuse OpenAI and Microsoft of “rampant theft” of copyrighted works. Leading the lawsuit is Julian Sancton, a New York Times reporter and best-selling nonfiction author. That complaint is the first copyright class action lawsuit to put OpenAI and Microsoft in the spotlight. The complaint claims that "OpenAI and Microsoft have built a business worth tens of billions of dollars by taking without permission the combined works of humanity."
In the United States, the ban on lawsuits has been opened. In September, a group of writers began legal action. Michael Chabon, David Henry Hwang, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman claim that OpenAI profits from the "unauthorized and illegal use" of its copyrighted content. The plaintiffs asserted that the artificial intelligence company “knew at all relevant times that the data sets it used to train its GPT models contained copyrighted materials, and that its actions violated the terms of use of the materials.”
In July, another group of writers, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey filed a lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Meta of copyright infringement. A month earlier, authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad reported OpenAI for similar reasons. The resolution of one of these cases can mean a before and after for AI companies. Imagine that the authors win a million-dollar lawsuit. Both the ChatGPT company and Microsoft could face an unstoppable flood of complaints both in the United States and in other countries.
The week has left impact images about how generative AIs work. The latest version of Midjourney shamelessly copies images from commercial films, subjecting them to minor changes. They are not identical, but very similar. It seems clear that it would not be difficult to prove in court that this AI specialized in imaging has been trained with copyrighted material. The creator revolution may be underway and its consequences would be unpredictable. To all this, Apple, which some accuse of being missing the AI train, has opened negotiations with publishing groups to obtain permission to use their materials. Not everyone is the same.
