Three prominent digital news outlets, The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet, have taken legal action against OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for copyright infringement. The organizations filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, alleging that OpenAI used thousands of their stories to train its chatbots without permission, payment, or credit. The lawsuit seeks damages of at least $2,500 for each instance of copyright infringement.

The three outlets claim that ChatGPT gave the impression of being an “intelligent” source of information, when in fact, it was frequently basing its responses on copyrighted works of journalism from the news outlets. The lawsuit also names Microsoft as a defendant because of its significant investment in OpenAI's artificial intelligence efforts. The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet argue that OpenAI's actions are detrimental to the already struggling news industry, as it undermines the hard work of journalists and allows AI developers to profit from their content.

While digital publications do not have the ability to pay for a federal copyright registration for all their material in bulk like print publications, the lawsuit argues that their journalism is still protected under copyright law. The outlets are seeking to hold OpenAI accountable for using their copyrighted material without authorization and are calling for the removal of all copyrighted articles from the data training sets used by ChatGPT.

The lawsuit against OpenAI follows similar legal action taken by The New York Times in December and highlights the growing concerns surrounding the use of copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence algorithms. The digital news outlets hope that this lawsuit will send a strong message to AI developers who disregard copyright laws and exploit the work of journalists for their own gain.