Publishers seek sanctions against OpenAI in NYT copyright battle

MUMBAI: The courtroom script just picked up a fresh plot twist. The legal battle between publishers and OpenAI has taken another dramatic turn, with a group of newspapers accusing the AI company of misleading a US federal court over how it handled copyrighted news content and ChatGPT records.

According to a Reuters report, a coalition led by The New York Times and the New York Daily News has asked a federal court in Manhattan to impose sanctions on OpenAI, arguing that the company made false representations during the ongoing copyright lawsuit over the use of news articles to train its artificial intelligence models.

In a court filing, the publishers sought sanctions, recovery of attorneys’ fees and a judicial finding that OpenAI’s ChatGPT logs showed the use of their copyrighted works. They alleged the company repeatedly claimed it could not search its large language models for copies of publishers’ content, despite having already conducted such searches before any of the lawsuits were filed.

The newspapers further alleged that OpenAI deleted billions of ChatGPT conversations, or rendered them impossible to search, arguing that the records were relevant evidence in the case.

Ian Crosby, lead counsel for The New York Times, said OpenAI had spent more than two years telling the publishers, the public and the court that searching ChatGPT outputs for copyrighted news content was not feasible, while allegedly carrying out those very searches internally.

According to the filing, OpenAI had previously maintained that it lacked the tools to search its datasets and output logs for copyrighted material. However, the publishers claimed testimony from an OpenAI employee later revealed that the company had performed multiple internal searches for content belonging to the news organisations involved in the litigation.

The dispute stems from a lawsuit filed by The New York Times in 2023, which accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of the newspaper’s articles without permission to train the large language models powering ChatGPT.

The case has become one of the most closely watched copyright disputes in the AI industry. It is among a growing wave of lawsuits brought by publishers, authors, visual artists, music labels and other copyright owners against AI developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms, over the alleged use of protected works to train generative AI systems.