OpenAI's response to the New York Times lawsuit: fact-checking and analysis

Ian Crosby, partner at Susman Godfrey and lead attorney for The New York Times, commented to Search Engine Journal: "The blog acknowledges that OpenAI used the work of The Times, along with the work of many others, to create ChatGPT. As The Times' complaint states, 'through Microsoft's Bing Chat (recently renamed 'Copilot') and OpenAI's ChatGPT, the defendants are attempting to take free advantage of The Times' heavy investment in journalism by using it to create substitute products without permission or payment'. This is not fair use by any measure."

"The New York Times filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI (as well as Microsoft), saying ChatGPT 'reproduces Times content verbatim' among other complaints."

The lawsuit presented evidence of how GPT-4 could display large amounts of New York Times content without attribution as evidence that GPT-4 was infringing on New York Times content. The allegation that GPT-4 outputs exact copies of New York Times content is significant because it flies in the face of OpenAI's insistence that their use of the data is transformative, a legal framework tied to the fair use doctrine.

• 📌 "Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by allowing unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain circumstances. ... 'transformative' uses are more likely to be found fair. Transformative uses are those that add something new, with an additional purpose or a different character, and do not replace the original use of the work."