AI boom leads to court cases over copyright

In focus is fair use’ doctrine in IP law that lets creators build on copyrighted work

The boom in artificial intelligence (AI) tools that draw on troves of content from across the Internet has begun to test the bounds of copyright law.

Authors and a leading photo agency have brought suits over the past year, contending that their intellectual property (IP) was illegally used to train AI systems, which can produce human-like prose and power applications like chatbots.

Now they have been joined in the spotlight by the news industry.

The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Dec 27 accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of copyright infringement, the first such challenge by a major American news organisation over the use of AI.

The lawsuit contends that OpenAl's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing Chat can produce content nearly identical to Times articles, allowing the companies to "freeride on The Times's massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment".

OpenAI and Microsoft have not had the chance to respond in court.

But after the lawsuit was filed, those companies noted that they were in discussions with a number of news organisations on using their content and, in the case of OpenAI, had begun to sign deals.

Without such agreements, the limits may be worked out in the courts, with significant repercussions. Data is crucial to developing generative AI technologies - which can generate text, images and other media on their own - and to the business models of companies doing that work.