Why is NY Times Suing Microsoft and OpenAI?

First, Happy New Year!

Open AI is the company that created the revolutionary ChatGPT product. Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI and uses OpenAI's tech to power Bing Chat. NY Times is a popular newspaper. What's happening between the three?

NY Times is suing Open AI and Microsoft for using NY Times' data while training their AI models, Chat GPT and Bing Chat. NY Times alleges that when asked about the news, these chatbots give answers very similar to the wording used by the NY Times. But why is this a problem?

You must ask yourselves the question 'how do newspapers make money'? The two most standard methods are by subscriptions and by displaying ads. But if readers can get this information via ChatGPT, none of those users will subscribe to the NY Times, right? These users won't see any ads as well. What will happen to the NY Times, then?

Here's the other question: why can't OpenAI and Microsoft chatbots unlearn any data they have from the NY Times? In short, unlearning specific data might take a lot of time, money, and effort. Additionally, suppose these companies did choose to go the 'unlearn' route; what's to stop other publishers from stepping up and saying their data must be unlearned, too? It's a tricky situation.

Did the NY Times wake up one day and decide to sue these companies? Not really. NY Times tried chatting with these companies for a few months before the NY Times decided the best way forward was to take this to court.

The argument in court may boil down to the question: Can publicly available information on the web be used to train AI models? Let's see what happens next.

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