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OpenAI responds publicly to NY Times copyright lawsuit: ‘without merit’

2024 will most likely be a defining year for the technology and the legality of its controversial training data sources.

The big headline (pun intended) is OpenAI’s attempt to square its recent content licensing deals with other rival news outlets and publishers — including Axel Springer (publisher of Politico and Business Insider), and the Associated Press (AP) — with its prior position that it could and can continue to lawfully scrape any public website for training data on which to train its AI models, including the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models powering ChatGPT. In today’s blog post, OpenAI says that it believes “using publicly available internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents” but notes that it provides “a simple opt-out process for publishers (which The New York Times adopted in August 2023) to prevent our tools from accessing their sites.” OpenAI and the NYT will square off before Federal District Court Judge Sidney H. Stein, though our review of the case docket did not show any date for an initial hearing.

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