A battle for the future of copyright

The outcome of NYT's lawsuit against OpenAI holds the key to the fate of human content creators, with ramifications for the entire publishing industry

Just before 2023 ended, The New York Times (NYT) shocked the generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) evangelists of Silicon Valley by filing a detailed and lengthy lawsuit against OpenAI and its primary partner, Microsoft, for copyright violations. It accused OpenAI of unauthorised use of millions of the newspaper’s deeply reported articles to train ChatGPT, the GenAI model promising to upend entire industries, from pharmaceuticals to movies — and especially publishing. NYT pointed out that ChatGPT was making money using NYT articles and directly affecting the publishers revenues without paying a penny.

The meticulously detailed NYT complaint contained hundreds of ChatGPT outputs