The New York Times sues OpenAI & Mircosoft

I received today a newsletter from Igor Pogany, from MyAIAdvantage about the New York Times suing OpenAI. I met Igor recently in a capacity building organized by the YMCA World Alliance, and he was introducing Chat GPT's unbelievable abilities. The truth is, it feels illegal for anyone to own such an assistance. I spent 20 years of my life developing written communication skills and my ability to articulate plans strategically and tactically. In the hands of way less qualified individuals, Chat GPT can out skill me in producing better-quality papers in a fraction of the time.

But let's go back to the main story. ​A federal lawsuit filed by The New York Times accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of copyright infringement, claiming ChatGPT was illegally trained on Times data. If the Times' demands are met, it will spell the end for ChatGPT. For months, attorneys negotiated a licensing agreement that would compensate the Times for the unauthorized use of their content. Recently the discussion turned more hostile, and the Times lawyers threatened to sue if they couldn't agree. That day has come. The legal teams couldn't see eye-to-eye behind closed doors, so the matter would be decided in a court of law.

OpenAI insists that since the data was used for research, ChatGPT does indeed transform the Times material it was trained on. Predictably, the Times disagrees. In the lawsuit, they argue that "...there is nothing transformative about using the Times content without payment to create products that substitute for the Times and steal audiences away from it.". Well, I can't quite argue against that !! would you !!

Originally, ChatGPT was not designed for commercial use. It was released as a research preview, and OpenAI had yet to learn how popular it would become. Copyright issues shouldn't have ever been a problem. But the overwhelming popularity of ChatGPT had OpenAI seeing dollar signs they couldn't ignore, and now they may pay the price for rushing to market.

The suit seeks billions of dollars in damages, and the Times lawyers are asking the courts to destroy all LLMs trained on publicly available data, including ChatGPT.

Check the article for the story: here

I will follow up on this story and add updates here in my blog; What do you think about that? drop me a comment!