Microsoft requests dismissal of New York Times’ lawsuit

The tech giant likened the lawsuit to Hollywood’s outdated fight against the VCR, calling it short-sighted

Microsoft has responded to a copyright infringement lawsuit from the New York Times, which accused Microsoft and OpenAI of using its content to train artificial intelligence. Microsoft called the claim a false narrative of “doomsday futurology” and likened the lawsuit to Hollywood’s past resistance against the VCR. In a motion to dismiss part of the lawsuit, Microsoft scoffed at the newspaper’s assertion that its content receives “particular emphasis” and that tech companies are trying to benefit from the Times’s journalism investment. The lawsuit, which could impact the future of AI and news-content production, alleges that Microsoft and OpenAI unlawfully used the Times’s articles and other content to create AI products that threaten the Times’s ability to provide its service.

Microsoft compared the lawsuit to Hollywood’s resistance to the VCR, which consumers used to record TV shows and was feared by the entertainment industry in the late 1970s for potentially disrupting its economic model.

Microsoft quoted a statement from Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Picture Association of America, in 1982, who likened the VCR to the Boston Strangler for the film industry and the American public. Microsoft argued that the Times was using its influence to challenge the latest technological advance: the Large Language Model.

Microsoft’s lawyers also contended that training models like LLMs with content does not replace the market for the works; instead, it teaches the models language.

OpenAI has filed a request to dismiss portions of the lawsuit, claiming that the publisher allegedly “paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products” to generate instances of copyright infringement using ChatGPT.

OpenAI’s attorneys argued that ChatGPT is not intended as a replacement for a subscription to The New York Times. They stated, “In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product for that purpose. Nor could they. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”

After Microsoft filed its legal response, the Times responded, challenging the comparison to 1980s home-taping technology.

Ian Crosby, lead counsel for the New York Times, stated, “Microsoft doesn’t dispute that it worked with OpenAI to copy millions of The Times’s works without its permission to build its tools,” adding that Microsoft’s comparison of LLMs to the VCR is odd because VCR makers never argued that massive copyright infringement was necessary to build their products.

He continued, “Despite Microsoft’s attempts to frame its relationship with OpenAI as a mere ‘collaboration,’ in reality, as The Times’s complaint states, the two companies are intertwined when it comes to building their generative AI tools.”

This battle is part of a series of lawsuits over various aspects of copyright, including ownership of creative work produced using AI technology, and concerns that AI can generate highly misleading information, often referred to in the industry as “hallucinations.”

Google issued an apology last month after its Gemini chatbot generated images depicting Black soldiers in World War II-style German military uniforms and Vikings wearing traditional Native American dress. As a response, Google temporarily disabled the technology’s capability to create images of people and committed to correcting what it termed “inaccuracies in some historical” depictions.

The dual concerns—regarding AI’s potential copyright violations and its creation of highly improbable information or images—emerge as OpenAI recently admitted that training AI models without copyrighted material is “impossible” due to the broad scope of contemporary copyright laws, which encompass almost all forms of human expression. OpenAI has declined to reveal the contents of its training datasets, including those for its latest tool, a video generator named Sora.

In a letter to the UK’s House of Lords, the company also argued that restricting the training data to public domain content would not yield AI systems that meet the demands of modern society.

OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, expressed surprise at the Times’s lawsuit in January, asserting that the system did not require the Times’s data for its training. “I think this is something that people don’t understand. Any one particular training source, it doesn’t move the needle for us that much,” Altman claimed.