In response to The New York Times recent lawsuit against tech giants Microsoft and OpenAI, OpenAI has issued an official response, asserting its dedication to journalism collaboration and expressing the belief that the lawsuit lacks merit.

We build AI to empower people, including journalists.

Our position on the @nytimes lawsuit:
• Training is fair use, but we provide an opt-out
• “Regurgitation” is a rare bug we’re driving to zero
• The New York Times is not telling the full storyhttps://t.co/S6fSaDsfKb

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) January 8, 2024

The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges copyright infringement and unauthorized use of The New York Times’ content by both Microsoft and OpenAI in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) services. It claims that millions of copyrighted articles from The New York Times were utilized to train AI models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, resulting in potential damages amounting to billions of dollars.

OpenAI, recognized for its generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, has faced scrutiny for its practice of using web-scraped text to train its models. This legal challenge marks the first significant confrontation with a major media organization.

OpenAI’s official announcement on the lawsuit highlights several key points:

1. Collaboration with News Organizations: OpenAI emphasizes its commitment to supporting news organizations, collaborating with them, and creating new opportunities. The company aims to deploy its products to benefit reporters and editors, assist in analyzing public records, and provide AI models with additional historical, non-publicly available content.
2. Fair Use of Training: OpenAI asserts that training AI models using publicly available internet materials is fair use, supported by widely accepted precedents. While acknowledging legal rights, OpenAI underscores its commitment to being good citizens and has implemented an opt-out process for publishers to prevent its tools from accessing their sites.
3. Addressing “Regurgitation”: OpenAI acknowledges the existence of rare instances of “regurgitation” or inadvertent memorization in its models and is actively working to minimize such occurrences. Intentionally manipulating models to regurgitate content is deemed inappropriate and against the terms of use.
4. Incomplete Narrative by The New York Times: OpenAI contends that The New York Times is not telling the full story. The company asserts that discussions with The New York Times were progressing constructively toward a high-value partnership around real-time content display with attribution in ChatGPT. The lawsuit came as a surprise and disappointment to OpenAI, as it believes a partnership could have been mutually beneficial.

OpenAI expresses optimism for a constructive partnership with The New York Times, respecting its long history and commitment to journalism. The company looks forward to continued collaboration with news organizations, contributing to the elevation of journalism through the transformative potential of AI.