The Justice Department sided with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Microsoft in a lawsuit against the two companies brought by the New York Times, with lawyers for the government asserting that the success of America’s artificial intelligence industry is an important national security interest.
In a Tuesday court filing, the government’s lawyers urged a judge to reject the Times’s arguments that the training of AI on the newspaper’s content violated copyright law.
The government is not a party to the case, which the Times brought against the tech companies in 2023. But court rules allow the Justice Department to make a statement of interest in pending litigation.
In its filing, the Justice Department said that constraining the development of large language models like ChatGPT would hinder important creative and scientific progress.
“This Administration will never let our Nation be at a disadvantage relative to our foreign adversaries based on a plainly incorrect understanding of copyright law,” wrote Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, one of the attorneys in the filing, on social media.
Large language models like ChatGPT are initially trained on vast quantities of text scraped from the internet, learning patterns that enable them to string words together. The Times has argued that OpenAI and Microsoft relied on millions of its articles to train models like ChatGPT and Copilot, and is seeking monetary damages and a court order halting the practice.
While most of the leading AI companies have not disclosed the exact makeup of their training data, they have asserted that their free use of the internet for training data falls under “fair use” — a concept that allows people to use copyrighted works if they are substantially changed (parody, for instance, is one common category generally protected under fair use).
In its filing, the Justice Department sided with the companies’ interpretation that AI models’ use of training data constituted fair use because of the ways they transformed it. The government dismissed the need for licensing fees that it said “would disproportionately benefit legacy media outlets.”
“The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole,” said Graham James, a spokesperson for the Times. “Both AI and creators can thrive — AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires.”
The Times’s lawsuit is one of several against a major AI company pushing back on the use of books, articles, online forums and other content on the internet to train powerful and lucrative AI models, claiming original authors have not been credited or compensated.
The rise of AI has presented a host of challenges for many news publishers, including by reducing the quantity of reader traffic available through traditional search engines such as Google. Some companies, including the Associated Press, have entered into paid agreements with OpenAI permitting their news stories to be used for training. (The Washington Post also has a content partnership with OpenAI, which enables ChatGPT to respond to questions with summaries, quotes and links to relevant original reporting.)
OpenAI has also said it has an opt-out process for publishers to prevent its tools from accessing content in the training phase.
But in its court filing, the government asserted that requiring licensing fees for newspaper content would “hamper competition in the market for LLMs” and hurt smaller tech companies.
“It is not in the public’s interest for the largest technology companies to have an oligopoly on LLM training due to licensing entry barriers that function primarily as large subsidies for old mainstream media companies,” the government wrote.
Microsoft declined to comment. OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment.
This is the second time in recent months that the Justice Department has weighed in on a major case involving an AI company. In June, the government asked a judge in Mississippi to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the NAACP and several environmental groups against Elon Musk’s xAI over data center construction. In that case, the Justice Department also cited U.S. national security interests in AI.
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