📰 Key Takeaways

OpenAI and Microsoft have been hit with another lawsuit from two news publishers, accused of using news content to train AI models without authorization. The joint suit from The Seattle Times and Newsday argues that the rise of AI could cause “irreparable harm” to journalism, comparing generative AI to “a snake eating its own tail” — technology that could ultimately “destroy the very media organizations that provided the content used to train it.”

The complaint doesn’t pull any punches, stating that “AI products like ChatGPT and CoPilot are marketed as producers of content, but in reality they’re voracious consumers of it — they devour human-created work and regurgitate copies and derivative imitations of that original content to serve their own commercial purposes.”

This lawsuit continues a wave that started with The New York Times’ 2023 copyright infringement suit against OpenAI and its investment partner Microsoft, which has since drawn other publishers into similar litigation. What makes The Seattle Times’ complaint particularly awkward is that Microsoft and OpenAI have actually funded some of the outlet’s journalism programs and grants in the past — now they’ve become adversaries in court.

Responding to the suit, a Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire the company was “surprised” by the lawsuit, but remained “happy to sit down and find solutions to these kinds of disputes” — a response that neither firmly denied the claims nor pushed back aggressively.

💬 JudyAI Lab Take

According to The Seattle Times and Newsday, OpenAI and Microsoft are accused of using news content without authorization to train AI models, with the complaint going so far as to describe generative AI as “a snake eating its own tail” that could end up devouring the very media outlets that supplied its training material.

This lawsuit follows the same path as The New York Times’ 2023 suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, showing that the copyright dispute has grown from a single case into an industry-wide wave of litigation. What’s particularly interesting is that Microsoft and OpenAI previously funded some of The Seattle Times’ journalism programs and grants — and now find themselves on opposing sides in court, which highlights that the “cooperate yet compete” tension between AI companies and the content industry hasn’t actually been resolved. The complaint’s language cuts straight to the core issue: AI products are marketed as content producers, but in practice they operate by absorbing existing content at scale and then outputting derivative versions. For AI builders, this is a reminder that the licensing status and usage boundaries of training data will be a key variable in whether a product can stand on solid ground long-term — not a secondary concern to deal with after launch.

As these disputes continue to escalate, AI products would do well to audit the licensing status of their training data at the design stage, rather than trying to fix it after the fact.

📅 Original Source Info

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