The boom in artificial intelligence tools that draw on troves of content from across the internet has begun to test the bounds of copyright law.

Authors and a leading photo agency have brought suit over the past year, contending that their intellectual property was illegally used to train AI systems, which can produce humanlike prose and power applications like chatbots.

Now they have been joined in the spotlight by the news industry. The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing Open AI and Microsoft of copyright infringement, the first such challenge by a major American news organization over the use of artificial intelligence.

The lawsuit contends that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat can produce content nearly identical to Times articles, allowing the companies to “free ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.”

OpenAI and Microsoft have not had an opportunity to respond in court. But after the lawsuit was filed, those companies noted that they were in discussions with a number of news organizations on using their content — and, in the case of OpenAI, had begun to sign deals.

Without such agreements, the limits may be worked out in the courts, with significant repercussions. Data is crucial to developing generative AI technologies — which can generate text, images and other media on their own — and to the business models of companies doing that work.

“Copyright will be one of the key points that shapes the generative AI industry,” said Fred Havemeyer, an analyst at the financial research firm Macquarie.

A central consideration is the “fair use” doctrine in intellectual property law, which allows creators to build upon copyrighted work. Among other factors, defendants in copyright cases need to prove that they transformed the content substantially and are not competing in the same market as a substitute for the work of the original creator.

A review quoting passages from a book, for example, could be considered fair use because it builds on that content to create new, unique work. Selling extended excerpts from the book, on the other hand, may violate the doctrine.

Source: Business Standard