OpenAI claims it cannot advance if not allowed to use copyrighted material amid NYT lawsuit

The creator of ChatGPT recently said that the inability to use copyrighted material such as news and books to train chatbots will ultimately fizzle the development of artificial intelligence, according to the Telegraph. The statements come after the New York Times has sued the company for violation of copyright law.

OpenAI has lamented the potential progress of artificial intelligence by saying it is "impossible" to create advanced technological services like ChatGPT if it is prevented from using copyrighted work to train the bots. The latest development could ignite a debate over the legalities of using material that is protected by law.

The company — which could be valued as high as $100 billion — is prepared to push back against lawsuits filed by book publishers and the New York Times for using its copyrighted material without consent to "train" ChatGPT, according to Futurism.

The Post Millennial published a piece in early 2023 that suggested OpenAI could eat up as much as 80% of the U.S. job market in the future. And many have expressed reluctance about the latest developments in artificial intelligence, which some believe could risk the future of humanity.

"Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression – including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents – it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials," OpenAI told the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee.

"Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.”

Despite OpenAI's claim that it has complied with copyright laws, book publishers and authors maintain that tech companies have been using their material without getting permission first.

In December, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that they are "profit[ing] from the massive copyright infringement, commercial exploitation and misappropriation of The Times’s intellectual property."

The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies on these grounds. The lawsuit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, contends that "millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information."

Additionally, authors George R.R. Martin and John Grisham have sued the company for using their books to train ChatGPT without obtaining the necessary permission to do so.

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