The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit formed from a merger with Mother Jones, sued OpenAI and Microsoft for alleged copyright infringement in the use of the Center’s articles to train AI.
The lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York, which already has several pending lawsuits involving newspapers and online publishers.
This brings the total number of copyright lawsuits against AI companies to 27 in the United States.
It looks like The Center has used the same technique of inserting a snippet from three of their articles to produce regurgitations on ChatGPT, attached as Exhibit 7.
The Center also provided 3 examples of abridgments of their articles by using a prompt of this type: “Please tell me about the 2023 Mother Jones article ‘Why Is the Colorado River Running Dry?’ Please format your response as a detailed summary.”
Download the PDF of the Complaint below.
- Count I: Copyright infringement by OpenAI
- Count II: Copyright infringement by Microsoft
- Count III: Contributory infringement by all defendants
- Count IV: Violation of 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b)(1) by OpenAI Defendants: CMI removal
- Count V: Violation of 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b)(3) by OpenAI Defendants: distribution of copies of works with CMI removed