Did OpenAI Pull Off the Biggest IP Heist of All-Time?

VCR recordings. Book digitization. The use of existing code to build a new operating system.

The legality of some of the most consequential technology and products in the last century have come down to a singular question: Are they protected under fair use, the legal doctrine allowing the use of copyrighted works without a license?

Now, that question has become the central battleground in landmark lawsuits between publishers, studios and recording companies against artificial intelligence companies over large language models. In the near future, these platforms are positioned to break through as the gateway to the internet — and information — to billions of people across the world.

If you ask these AI firms, they’ll say the secret sauce to their technology was innovation. The New York Times and eleven other publishers suing Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of their articles to train AI systems have a different answer: theft.

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” said a 2023 internal Microsoft document, which noted that “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.”