A newly unredacted filing in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft has detailed internal concerns about AI training practices and the impact of chatbot products on publishers.
According to The Times’ legal brief, internal Microsoft data showed that Copilot reduced click-through rates to nytimes.com by as much as 93% compared with traditional Bing search. The filing also cites internal discussions at OpenAI and Microsoft about AI products potentially replacing visits to original news sources and weakening publishers’ revenue.
The brief alleges that OpenAI employees discussed bypassing The Times’ paywall to obtain training content. It also claims that mid-training datasets contained more than 91,692 copies of works from The New York Times, the Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, while a separate Common Crawl-based dataset included more than two million documents from nytimes.com.
The Times further alleges that copyright notices were removed from some training data. OpenAI has defended its practices on fair use grounds, while the newspaper argues that AI-generated answers compete with the journalism used to train the models.
The underlying exhibits remain sealed, and the allegations and quoted communications are not court findings. OpenAI and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment before publication.
Source: EntArabi
