The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over ChatGPT

The New York Times was the first major American newspaper to sue software companies OpenAI and Microsoft over their AI chatbot ChatGPT. The newspaper accuses the companies of using knowledge from millions of articles to fuel ChatGPT and thereby build a business at the expense of the New York Times.

The conclusion states:

The abbreviation AI stands for artificial intelligence, which refers to methods of transferring human thought processes to computers. A chatbot is a text dialogue system based on a computer program.

Most important start-up in the world

The software company OpenAI, which is heavily backed by Microsoft, caused a stir a little over a year ago with its AI chatbot. ChatGPT fueled the hype around artificial intelligence with expectations of a digital land of milk and honey for all, to fears that humanity would be wiped out.

This made OpenAI the most important start-up in the world, with an estimated value of $80 billion – a company that could change the world and put pressure on tech heavyweights such as Google and the Facebook group Meta.

Users can easily communicate freely with ChatGPT and, for example, divide tasks or request knowledge – they then receive answers that often hardly differ from human answers. To do this, OpenAI has provided ChatGPT with almost all the knowledge on the Internet. From forum submissions, company websites, scripts to journalistic articles.

The New York Times is now hoping for compensation. It is not impossible that a successful lawsuit in the media industry could be repeated.

(hah/sda/awp/dpa)