The laws of copyright have long been considered intricate and problematic, as substantiated by previous court rulings such as Oracle Am., Inc. v. Google Inc.. However, an emerging class of cases presents fresh challenges to these laws, notably involving generative AI programs being challenged for their alleged utilization of copyrighted materials.
Mentions of such cases which have stirred considerable debate include Michael Chabon’s and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ class actions against OpenAI Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc., as well as class action lawsuits involving famed authors and including comedian Sarah Silverman. These were filed in different locations including the northern districts of California and the southern district of New York.
The addition to these already complicated situations is a recent complaint filed by The New York Times against OpenAI, Microsoft and other parties contending that their Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) systems have led to copyright infringements. Moreover, it suggests manipulation of information attributed to The Times by outputs from AI systems such as ChatGPT and Bing Chat.
Claims made by The Times extend to direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringements; unfair competition; trademark dilution, and breaches of theDigital Millennium Copyright Act — Removal of Copyright Measurement Information.
According to the complaint, OpenAI’s GPT copied published articles directly and also demonstrated capabilities to provide content that would generally be protected by The Times’ payment restrictions. It has been alleged that the AI’s learning process included the storage of encoded copies of articles in computer memory and recurrent reproduction of copies for training data sets, leading to millions of The Times’ pieces getting “copied and ingested.” In the absence of actual content, it was alleged that the chatbots invented and falsely attributed “hallucinations” to The Times. Further explorations and discussions can be made on the originalarticle itself.