US Government Backs Artificial Intelligence Company in New York Times Lawsuit

The U.S. government has sided with OpenAI in a legal case brought by the New York Times over OpenAI training artificial intelligence (AI) models on paywalled New York Times articles.

“The United States has a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law,” government lawyers said in a Sept. 1 brief filed with federal court in New York City. LLMs, or large language models, are trained on documents and images.

The reasons behind the government’s position, the lawyers said, include ensuring AI systems are capable of assisting the military and helping “level the playing field between mainstream and independent publishers” by enabling “authors with limited resources” to compete by, for example, using the models to generate images to accompany articles.

The New York Times in 2023 sued OpenAI, which runs a model called ChatGPT, and its partner Microsoft. The paper said that the companies were committing copyright violations by copying millions of its news articles and other pieces of content and using the content to train ChatGPT.

OpenAI has said in filings that using the content falls under fair use, or exceptions to copyright law outlined in the Copyright Act of 1976 and later defined in various court rulings.

“Copyright is not a veto right over transformative technologies that leverage existing works internally—i.e., without disseminating them—to new and useful ends, thereby furthering copyright’s basic purpose without undercutting authors’ ability to sell their works in the marketplace,” the company said in one filing.

The New York Times has told the court that “there is nothing ‘transformative’ about using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it” and “because the outputs of Defendants’ … models compete with and closely mimic the inputs used to train them, copying Times works for that purpose is not fair use.”

Government lawyers said in the new brief that using copyrighted content to teach LLMs how to recognize data patterns and adapt to new information is “extraordinarily transformative.”

They added, “Beyond the subject matter of this litigation, LLMs are already helping researchers across fields achieve major breakthroughs. Constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.”

The filing came as the judge overseeing the case considers motions for summary judgement, or a final ruling in the case. Outside groups and individuals have until Oct. 16 to file briefs in support of a side. Whichever party loses can appeal the ruling.