Source: The Spokesman-Review

The Spokesman-Review reports that the legal pressure on AI developers has intensified as nine additional major newspapers, including the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Denver Post, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The complaint, filed in a New York federal court, alleges that the tech giants have pilfered millions of copyrighted articles without permission or payment to train their generative AI models, such as ChatGPT and Copilot. The publishers, owned by Alden Global Capital, argue that the defendants simply took the content they needed to build lucrative products, effectively competing with the very news organizations that provided the raw material.

The lawsuit mirrors the landmark case filed by The New York Times earlier, asserting that the AI systems not only scrape text but also reproduce substantial portions of articles verbatim ("regurgitation"), thereby undermining the newspapers' subscription models. Furthermore, the plaintiffs claim that OpenAI and Microsoft intentionally removed copyright management information (CMI), such as author bylines and titles, during the training process, which constitutes a separate violation of federal law. The publishers are seeking unspecified monetary damages and a court order to stop the unauthorized use of their archives, challenging the tech industry's reliance on the "fair use" doctrine for model training.