Eight newspaper companies, all owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital, filed lawsuits this week against OpenAI and Microsoft. They allege that Microsoft’s OpenAI chatbots and assistants were improperly trained on copyrighted news articles without permission or payment.

New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Florida Sun Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pioneer Press among the newspapers Involved in a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.

The lawsuits allege that both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot displayed an uncanny ability to reproduce verbatim excerpts from specific articles when prompted. Screenshots provided by the plaintiffs also showed that Copilot offers full news stories a day or two after publication without a clear link to the original source.

In addition, the newspapers argue that artificial intelligence systems built on vast amounts of unlicensed copyrighted text actually allow companies to profit greatly from journalistic content without compensating advertisers fairly.

According to the lawsuit, both OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft acknowledged that large language models require significant amounts of text data to train. However, the companies downplayed any wrongdoing. OpenAI claims that ChatGPT can be manipulated, which can be used for infringing purposes , but it also has significant legal applications.

An OpenAI spokesperson responded (via New York Times) about the lawsuits, saying the company was “not previously aware” of the specific concerns raised by Alden Global Capital.

Together with our news partners, we see huge potential for AI tools like ChatGPT to deepen advertisers’ relationships with readers and improve the news experience

The lawsuits follow a similar lawsuit filed in December by The New York Times, which accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using copyrighted Times articles to train chatbots. Microsoft tried to dismiss parts of that lawsuit, arguing that the NYT failed to show harm because the AI ​​models did not replace the news story market.

Meanwhile, Axel Springer and the Financial Times recently announced that they have reached an agreement with OpenAI, allowing its content to be used to train chatbots.