Major newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft over stolen articles
The Seattle Times and Newsday are taking OpenAI and Microsoft to court, claiming the companies used their journalism to train AI without permission. They join dozens of other news outlets in similar lawsuits.
Two major American newspapers—the Seattle Times and Newsday—have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. They claim the companies used their published articles as training data for AI models without asking for permission.
When you ask ChatGPT (OpenAI's AI chatbot) or Copilot (Microsoft's AI tool) a question, these systems sometimes reproduce passages directly from news articles in their answers. The newspapers say this is copyright infringement—basically, using someone else's creative work without permission or payment. It's like copying paragraphs from a book and publishing them as your own.
This isn't the first time. The New York Times, Merriam-Webster dictionary, and Encyclopedia Britannica have already filed similar lawsuits. Now nearly 400 local newspapers across the country have joined in too. They're all saying the same thing: AI companies trained their systems on journalism without asking, and they should have to pay for it.
Microsoft is named in this lawsuit because Copilot is built on top of OpenAI's technology. For ordinary readers, this matters because it raises a real question: should AI companies be allowed to use professional journalism for free to build their products? The answer could affect how news organizations survive and whether they can keep doing the reporting work that costs real money.
Original source: The Verge AI