It’s infuriating when journalists hear newspapers are dying from the internet, scores of social media platforms and public mistrust of the press, and another presumed nail in the coffin is placing newspapers under siege.
As reported last week by the New York Daily News, The New York Times filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of using the newspaper’s web content for artificial intelligence like ChatGPT without paying.
The Times alleges that ChatGPT was fed huge numbers of articles produced by the paper’s website to allow the program to learn using the “large language model.” As the Times’ complaint states, “an LLM works by predicting words that are likely to follow a given string of text based on the potentially billions of examples used to train it.”
By framing the complaint in that language, the New York Times might just have saved local journalism.
When OpenAI began it was a nonprofit, sharing with all its creations for the betterment of humankind, according to the Daily News, but the humans in charge didn’t need AI to learn about the profit motive and they changed to a proprietary system to sell. No more sharing from them and customers have to pay.
Here’s the problem: OpenAI could have used non-copyrighted works for their classroom, like the collected plays, poems and sonnets of Shakespeare, according to the Daily News report. That would be perfectly legal, but ChatGPT would then write and speak like an Englishman of 400 years ago.
The New York Times is made of sterner stuff. Another internet invention, AI, is threatening the hegemony of the press. The Times is spearheading a fight for local journalism and protect not only its independence, but the integrity of the stories produced by local reporters. Artificial intelligence can be a teaching tool, but that doesn’t give it license to rewrite facts and alter the contents of stories readers trust to be real. And trust is exactly what is at stake here.