The New York Times filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on Wednesday, seeking the destruction of ChatGPT and all other large language models and training sets that have used its work without payment.

This is the first major media organization to sue the creators of ChatGPT, and its ruling could set a precedent for fair use laws surrounding artificial intelligence. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft trained their AI models using copyrighted data from The New York Times. Furthermore, it claims that ChatGPT and Bing Chat frequently reproduce The New York Times' articles in their entirety. This allows ChatGPT users to bypass The New York Times' paywall, and the lawsuit argues that generative AI has now become a competitor to newspapers as a reliable source of information. The New York Times' lawsuit aims to hold these companies accountable for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" and demands the destruction of "all GPT or other LLM models and training sets that contain Times works."

"These AI companies are pursuing another component, which is power," said Michael Butterick, the lawyer representing Sarah Silverman and other book authors in another copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. "They want to break the backbone of copyright law so that the copyright holders will not have veto power over what these AI companies do."

The court will ultimately have to decide whether training artificial intelligence on the open internet is allowed under fair use law. The fair use doctrine allows limited use of copyrighted works in certain circumstances, such as the use of short excerpts of articles in Google search results. The New York Times' lawyers argue that the use of copyrighted material by ChatGPT and Bing Chat is more egregious than search results because search engines provide a hyperlink indicating the source of the publisher's article, while the chatbots from Microsoft and OpenAI hide the information source.

According to The New York Times, Apple has recently begun negotiations with major news publishers to use their content to train the company's generative AI system. In a public statement, Apple acknowledged that it has fallen behind its competitors in artificial intelligence, but its ability to avoid major copyright cases faced by OpenAI and Microsoft presents a significant opportunity for it to catch up. OpenAI itself recently partnered with publisher Axel Springer to use content from Politico and other publishers in ChatGPT's responses. The New York Times reportedly approached OpenAI in April seeking a partnership but no agreement was reached.

The outcome of this lawsuit and similar ones in San Francisco could have a significant impact on the future of generative AI. Early innovators in the field of artificial intelligence such as Google, Adobe, and Microsoft have stated that they would protect users in court if they become involved in copyright cases, but these companies themselves have been accused of copyright infringement. The New York Times' lawsuit will help determine the role of OpenAI and Microsoft in the AI revolution. If The Times wins, it will be a major opportunity for Apple and other tech giants like Google to take the lead.