A number of suits have been filed regarding the use of copyrighted material during training of AI systems. But the Times' suit goes well beyond that to show how the material ingested during training can come back out during use. "Defendants’ GenAI tools can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style, as demonstrated by scores of examples," the suit alleges.

The suit alleges—and we were able to verify—that it's comically easy to get GPT-powered systems to offer up content that is normally protected by the Times' paywall. The suit shows a number of examples of GPT-4 reproducing large sections of articles nearly verbatim.

The suit includes screenshots of ChatGPT being given the title of a piece at The New York Times and asked for the first paragraph, which it delivers. Getting the ensuing text is apparently as simple as repeatedly asking for the next paragraph.

The suit is dismissive of attempts to justify this as a form of fair use. "Publicly, Defendants insist that their conduct is protected as 'fair use' because their unlicensed use of copyrighted content to train GenAI models serves a new 'transformative' purpose," the suit notes. "But there is nothing 'transformative' about using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it."

The suit seeks nothing less than the erasure of both any GPT instances that the parties have trained using material from the Times, as well as the destruction of the datasets that were used for the training. It also asks for a permanent injunction to prevent similar conduct in the future. The Times also wants money, lots and lots of money: "statutory damages, compensatory damages, restitution, disgorgement, and any other relief that may be permitted by law or equity."

  • FuckyWucky [none/use name]
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    NYT is totally going to win this lenin-sure

    Honestly I hope NYT goes bankrupt, they have always given me annoyingly smug elitist vibes. Where NY Post does transphobia overtly, NYT does transphobia 'respectfully'

    In April 2020, the New York Times ran a story with a strong headline about the situation of press freedom in India: “Under Modi, India’s Press Is Not So Free Anymore.” In that story, the reporters showed how Modi met with owners of the major media houses in March 2020 to tell them to publish “inspiring and positive stories.”

    When the case against NewsClick appeared to go cold, the New York Times – in August 2023 – published an enormously speculative and disparaging article against the foundations that provided some of NewsClick’s funds. The day after the story appeared, high officials of the Indian government went on a rampage against NewsClick, using the story as “evidence” of a crime. The New York Times had been warned previously that this kind of story would be used by the Indian government to suppress press freedom.

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