The New York Times, along with the Daily News group, Ziff Davis, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and The Intercept, filed a joint summary judgment brief in a US District Court. The plaintiffs seek billions of dollars in damages, citing internal documents from OpenAI and Microsoft that challenge the companies' fair use defense.
Internal communications reveal that Microsoft director Brent Hecht described the data scraping as an astonishing theft, while OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, acknowledged that AI products pose an existential threat to publishers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that chatbot conversations replaced visits to original sources.
Microsoft data indicates that click-through rates on Copilot dropped by 51 to 94 percent for Ziff Davis, 83 to 91 percent for the Daily News group, and 87 to 93 percent for The New York Times. OpenAI representatives confirmed the company did not review websites' terms of service during the crawling process.
The brief alleges that OpenAI used 1.8 million articles from the New York Times Annotated Corpus despite knowing the license restricted use to non-commercial research. Plaintiffs also claim that OpenAI implemented a filter after the lawsuits were filed to prevent the collection of evidence regarding copyright infringement.
The plaintiffs argue that the fair use defense is invalid because the defendants have already established licensing markets with other publishers. They also note that generating one million 500-word news articles using OpenAI's API costs approximately $6,800, facilitating the mass production of low-quality content.
