Eight major newspapers join legal backlash against OpenAI, Microsoft

Eight major daily newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News, sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Tuesday, joining the backlash to artificial-intelligence companies that have used copyrighted work to train their algorithms without compensating content owners.

The group includes South Florida’s Sun Sentinel, the Denver Post, Orange County (California) Register, San Jose Mercury News, Orlando Sentinel and St. Paul Pioneer Press. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft used their news articles to train and run their AI tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT. All eight publications are owned by Alden Global Capital, a New York City-based investment fund.

As AI companies improve their tools and push more people to use them, news publishers are becoming increasingly concerned that chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s search bot will take their business, leading to even more news industry layoffs and bankruptcies.

Some news organizations, such as Politico and its owner, Axel Springer, as well as the Financial Times, have signed deals with OpenAI to have some of their news content show up in answers to questions posed on ChatGPT. Others, such as the New York Times, have filed lawsuits. But Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and other AI companies insist that using news articles on the public web for training the underlying algorithms behind their AI tools qualifies as fair use—a concept in copyright law that allows re-purposing copyrighted work if it is substantially changed.

“They pay their engineers and programmers, they pay for servers and processors, they pay for electricity, and they definitely get paid from their astronomical valuations, but they don’t want to pay for the content without which they would have no product at all,” said Frank Pine, executive editor for the two groups that oversee the eight newspapers, MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing. “That’s not fair use, and it’s not fair. It needs to stop.”

“We take great care in our products and design process to support news organizations,” said Kayla Wood, an OpenAI spokesperson. “We are actively engaged in constructive partnerships and conversations with many news organizations around the world.” Microsoft spokesperson Julie Gates declined to comment.

Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Meta and other AI companies all scraped billions of sentences from the web to feed into the AI algorithms that now form the backbone of many of their products, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. The companies won’t say exactly what went into their tools, but previous, public versions of the same technology drew heavily on copyrighted news articles, as well as other sources such as e-books and Wikipedia articles.

The same fair-use argument is used when it comes to image-, audio- and video-generating AI tools. But many journalists, authors, graphic designers, artists and photographers disagree, saying their work is now being used to create tools that could be deployed to put them out of work. The AI companies are gearing up for the fight. This year, The Washington Post reported that OpenAI was hiring a corps of lawyers to push back against the growing number of lawsuits it is facing.