AI poses growing risk to democracy

On Nov. 30, 2022, San Franciscobased OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot capable of generating text almost indistinguishable from that written by a human. It wasn’t perfect — the bot had a tendency to “hallucinate facts” — but still prompted journalists to wonder whether the bot might eventually take their jobs.

- MARISA COULTON

At least journalists could take comfort in the fact that they had something ChatGPT didn’t: currency. Back in 2022, the AI chatbot couldn’t access real-time information, having only been trained on information up until September 2021.

That all changed in September 2023, when OpenAI announced that the chatbot was now up to date. Users could ask the bot questions about current affairs.

Later that year, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging in a court filing that the tech companies had unlawfully used the Times’ copyrighted articles to train its software. Microsoft and OpenAI sought to “free-ride on the Times’ massive investment in its journalism … without permission or payment,” reads the complaint.

The lawsuit added an additional layer of complexity to the discussion surrounding journalism and AI: the technology posed a threat not only to individual journalists and their livelihoods, but also to the field itself, by providing access to hard-won articles for free.

The chatbot’s outputs were “similar, but not identical” to Times articles, responded OpenAI in a motion. “Contrary to the allegations in the Complaint, ChatGPT is not in any way a substitute for a subscription to the New York Times,” the motion notes. “One cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”

The motion added that it is “perfectly lawful to use copyrighted content as part of a technological process that (as here) results in the creation of new, different and innovative products.”

Journalism advocates are not convinced.

Generative AI is a threat to journalism and everything it stands for, said Courtney Radsch, director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. In an interview with the Star, Radsch argues that AI companies are operating on a “model of theft” — and getting away with it.