MADRID, 27 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The New York Times Company, publisher of the New York newspaper, has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT, for the illegal use of millions of the newspaper's articles and investigations, protected by copyright, for creation and training of artificial intelligence services.

The complaint, filed this Wednesday before the Federal District Court in Manhattan, maintains that millions of articles published by the New York newspaper were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the media outlet as a reliable source of information.

"The defendants' illegal use of the Times's work to create competing artificial intelligence products threatens the Times' ability to provide that service," says the newspaper's publisher, adding that these generative artificial intelligence tools were created "copying and using millions of copyrighted news articles."

In this sense, he argues that, although the defendants copied on a large scale from many sources, they gave the Times a particular emphasis, which reveals a preference that recognizes the value of those works, noting that, through Microsoft's Bing Chat (recently rebranded as 'Copilot') and OpenAI's ChatGPT, the defendants seek to take advantage of the Times' enormous investment in journalism and use it to create substitute products without permission or payment.

Although the lawsuit does not specify any compensation, the document does warn that with this complaint it seeks to hold the defendants responsible "for the billions of dollars in legal and actual damages" related to the illegal copying and use of the Times' works. .

"If The Times and other news organizations cannot produce and protect their independent journalism, there will be a void that no computer or artificial intelligence can fill," he adds in his complaint.