NYT’s suit against OpenAI, Polish public media row – weekly news digest

In the last days of December The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The publisher alleges the two companies illegally used its content in training their large language models, including the ones powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

As BBC summarises, the lawsuit alleges “ChatGPT will sometimes generate ‘verbatim excerpts’ from New York Times articles, which cannot be accessed without paying for a subscription”, thus depriving the outlet of revenue. The claimant seeks monetary damages, though the exact amount isn’t specified, as well as calls for the defendants to destroy all LLMs trained on NYT content.

The suit follows months of unsuccessful negotiations between NYT and the two companies; in recent months other news companies like the AP and Axel Springer reached their own deals with OpenAI.

NYT isn’t the first publisher to sue AI companies for unauthorised use of its content in their training. However, given NYT’s vast reach and resources, this is the most important lawsuit to date. 

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The new Polish government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has set out to reform the country’s public media.

Analysts and international media have long alleged that Poland’s public television channel TVP became government mouthpieces under the previous government by the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS). The new centrist government has made it a priority to take control over TVP, as well as state radio and news agency organisations. 

In late December, shortly after coming to power, the new culture minister dismissed previous leaders of the state media organisations. The move has come under criticism from the now-opposition party PiS; Poland’s president Andrzej Duda, a PiS ally, vetoed the new government’s budget for public media. In response, the government put state broadcasters into liquidation, a procedure it says “helps protect the organizations as they are deprived of funding due to the ongoing political dispute”.

While the need to reform Poland’s public media has wide international support, the way the reorganisation has been conducted has come under criticism by some international media organisations. 

Source of the cover photo: https://unsplash.com/

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