USA Today Sues OpenAI, Demanding Over $250 Million

USA Today and a number of its affiliated local newspapers have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing it of copying hundreds of thousands of articles to train its models without permission, as reported by The Verge. The lawsuit focuses on the unauthorized and uncompensated use of journalistic content for training.

The publisher is seeking damages exceeding $250 million. The suit joins a growing list of AI-related copyright cases, including lawsuits by The New York Times and an alliance of nearly 400 local newspapers, making this legal dispute one of the broadest clashes between newsrooms and model developers.

The case revolves around whether using articles to train language models constitutes fair use or an unlawful copying of journalistic work. The core of the dispute lies in publishers viewing their articles as essential material for model creation, while AI companies rely on the principle of fair use, with the outcome depending on the US judiciary's interpretation of copyright law in the context of big data.

Publishers are closely monitoring these legal battles, as they will define the future relationship between newsrooms and AI companies, and whether model training will require paid licensing for the news content used. The forthcoming rulings are expected to shape the licensing market between publishers and developers in the coming years.

What do these terms mean?

Copyright: A legal right protecting creative works such as articles and books, preventing their use or copying without the right holder's permission.

Fair Use: An exception in US law allowing limited use of protected works without permission, often invoked in AI model training cases.

Large Language Models: Artificial intelligence programs trained on massive amounts of text to generate language and answer questions, such as ChatGPT.