Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training

The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft over the alleged use of their journalism to train artificial intelligence systems.

The lawsuit argues that the rise of generative AI could leave the journalism industry “broken beyond repair.” It describes generative AI as “a snake eating its own tail” and says it could “destroy the very organizations” that produce the content used to train it.

The filing says products such as ChatGPT and CoPilot are presented as content producers but consume human-authored material and return copies or derivative imitations of that material to support commercial objectives.

The case follows The New York Times’ 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright infringement. Other publications have also filed lawsuits as that case continued.

The Seattle Times’ lawsuit is notable because Microsoft and OpenAI have funded some of the organization’s journalism projects and fellowships. A Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire that the company was surprised by the lawsuit but remained willing to discuss solutions to this type of dispute.