Media and tech war over generative AI reaches new level

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The simmering war between the tech and media industries over generative AI just turned serious.

For a technology that raises profound questions about the way things like text, images and music are produced and used, the legal challenges this year have been surprisingly few and far between. Several novelists, journalists and comedians have sued for copyright infringement over claims their work has been used to train the large language models, while Getty Images took on Stability AI over use of its picture library and Anthropic was sued over song lyrics.

Yet most major rights owners have held back, hoping to find ways to share in the spoils from the new technology rather than seek to thwart it. In the only two notable agreements between the tech and media worlds so far, AP allowed its archives to be used to train OpenAI’s models, while Axel Springer, owner of Politico, Die Welt and Business Insider, reached a broader deal with the same company earlier this month.

That makes the lawsuit the New York Times has just lodged against OpenAI and Microsoft an ominous sign of what lies in store in 2024. According to the Times, months of negotiation have failed to produce terms that protect the company’s rights and provide fair compensation.

The lawsuits over generative AI carry a strong echo of the early cases that established the legal basis for search engines. Then, the US courts ruled that it was “fair use” to index copyrighted content when this was used to create “transformative” new search services. The short snippets of text and “thumbnail” images displayed in search engines were also found not to be substitutes for the original content, limiting the damage search might have on the media companies’ businesses.

There are some important differences this time. In its lawsuit, the NYT showed how it coaxed OpenAI’s ChatGPT and…