Publishers sue Microsoft, OpenAI over alleged content scraping

Publishers sue Microsoft, OpenAI over alleged content scraping

OpenAI and Microsoft have been slapped with a lawsuit by a group of publishers that own nearly 400 newspapers.

The publishers allege that the tech giants used their content without permission or compensation to develop products like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

The complaint was filed on Wednesday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Publishers allege 'systematically and secretly crawled' their websites

The publishers argue that these generative artificial intelligence products have generated billions of dollars in market value for OpenAI and Microsoft.

However, they claim that not a cent of this market value has been shared with them.

The complaint alleges that the defendants "systematically and secretly crawled" the publishers' websites, copying their articles and other original works onto their own servers.

AI boom will be 'death knell for local journalism'

The publishers have warned that unless companies developing AI products are held accountable for misusing their content, the AI boom will be a "death knell for local journalism."

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri defended the company's practices, stating that their models are "trained on publicly available data" and are grounded in fair use.

However, a Microsoft representative has yet to respond to requests for comment on this matter, Bloomberg reports.