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The New York Times has an edge in suit against OpenAI
To offer useful information, ChatGPT and other large language models need humans to report, vet and publish new facts. Who is going to pay for that?
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Legally, this clash represents something different: a classic instance of the lag between established law and emerging technology.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Noah Feldman
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The lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement pits one of the great establishment media institutions against the purveyor of a transformative new technology. Symbolically, the case promises a clash of the titans: labour-intensive human newsgathering against push-button information produced by artificial intelligence. But legally, the case represents something different: a classic instance of the lag between established law and emerging technology.
Copyright law, a set of rules dating back to the printing press, was not designed to cover large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. It will have to be consciously evolved by the courts – or amended by the US Congress – to fit our current circumstances.
