Meanwhile, “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use,” Hecht acknowledged in a Microsoft document.
News organizations say they’re ready to go to trial because there’s so much “compelling evidence of substitution.” If they can prove that chatbots are replacing them in their own markets, while serving to spit out excerpts of articles verbatim, they think that one-two punch may eviscerate Microsoft and OpenAI’s fair use arguments.
“The future not just of journalism but of responsible AI too depends on preserving incentives for humans to produce the creative works on which a healthy society depends,” news groups argued.
Chatbots are “largely substitutive, period”
Under oath, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that AI companies shouldn’t be violating news sites’ terms of use by dodging paywalls. But over at OpenAI, internal messages showed that when a staffer, Nick Ryder, informed President Greg Brockman that “a hack” was found for OpenAI crawlers “to get around” the NYT paywall, Brockman replied, “ah nice.”
Nadella also acknowledged that chatbots have served as substitutes for news platforms, describing the chatbot as stealing clicks from news sites by “giving you the information right there on the website on the AI platform versus needing to go to the underlying source.”
There’s consensus on that at OpenAI, where a software engineer said in an internal message that “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.”
OpenAI’s Turley agreed that there is “no good reason to click” when the chatbot provides information, the motion said. He also seemingly suggested that the doom loop was already in motion, describing chatbots as “largely substitutive, period” and predicting that they “will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”
News groups argued that insiders’ own statements should be damning.
“With respect to outputs that are substantially similar to training or grounding sources, courts have rejected claims that copying news articles to provide a product that substitutes for demand for news is fair use,” news groups argued.
