"The Shoestring," an independent news organization founded in western Massachusetts, is suing Microsoft and OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. It joins several other independent news outlets in filing a suit last week in New York’s Southern District seeking damages for the use of published material to build products like ChatGPT.
This suit follows similar ones filed by "The New York Times" and owners of local newspapers across the country including papers in our region like "The Daily Hampshire Gazette" and the "Greenfield Recorder." These news organizations are suing AI companies for the alleged theft of copyrighted material used to train the artificial intelligence technology.
Brian Zayatz is the managing editor of the Shoestring and spoke to NEPM’s the Fabulous 413 about their suit.
He said the online site's published material is being used without their permission.
"The law sort of implies that there should be compensation for that. So they may be able to solve the problem of actually redirecting people to local news sites. And, you know, we would certainly welcome that. But there is, I think, a pretty well documented case to make that a theft has taken place here,” Zayatz said.
Zayatz's said The Shoestring's lawsuit makes the case that OpenAI and Microsoft used a dataset that included over 68,000 tokens of text — about the length of a short novel — from "The Shoestring."
He said having readers back given the theft of readership will be especially helpful in an already threatened local journalism market.
When asked about the allegations in the suit as well as the other newspapers suing for theft of copyrighted material, a spokesperson for OpenAI said,
“Our models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, which helps hundreds of millions of people improve their daily lives and delivers benefits such as empowering human creativity, science, and medical research.”
A spokesperson from Microsoft referred NEPM to statements already published responding to "The New York Times" suit.
“Microsoft has deep respect for the critical role News Plaintiffs have long served in our public discourse, and Microsoft has partnered with news organizations to safeguard local and national journalism," said a spokesperson from Microsoft.
"But copyright law does not give News Plaintiffs the right to block transformative new technologies that do not replace their protected expression. The law expects rightsholders to adapt to technological progress, as they have successfully done before.”
The lawsuit is ongoing.