https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/08/openai-claims-ny-times-copyright-lawsuit-is-without-merit/

In late December, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its close collaborator and investor, Microsoft, for allegedly violating copyright law by training generative AI models on Times’ content. Today, OpenAI published a public response in which the startup — unsurprisingly — claims that the case is without merit.

In the response, posted this afternoon to OpenAI’s blog, the company reiterates its view that training AI models using publicly available data from the web — including news articles like The Times’ — is fair use. In other words, in creating generative AI systems like GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, which “learn” from millions of billions of examples of artwork, ebooks, essays and more to generate human-like text and images, OpenAI believes that it isn’t required to license or otherwise pay for the examples.