Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over training data

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The papers say their reporting was used as training data without permission and that the companies' chatbots reproduce passages from their articles. Microsoft is named because Copilot is built on OpenAI's technology.

The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster and Encyclopaedia Britannica have filed similar suits against OpenAI; nearly 400 local newspapers recently sued both companies. The local papers argue that chatbot answers reduce visits to their sites and with them subscription revenue. In this suit the plaintiffs ask for the destruction of copies of their works, of the training datasets containing them and of the models trained on them. OpenAI and Microsoft had not commented at the time of the report.