AI Meets Copyright: Understanding New York Times v. OpenAI

Artificial intelligence is the most important technological tool being developed today, but the use of preexisting copyrighted works to train these AI systems is deeply controversial. At the end of 2023 the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that OpenAI's use of articles from the New York Times to train their ChatGPT large language model constitutes copyright infringement. An answer is due at the end of February, and it's expected the case will revolve on the question of whether the use of the copyrighted content of the Times was a fair use. The fair use analysis will likely turn on whether the use of copyrighted content to train a AI system "transforms" the work in a way which makes the use fair. The Supreme Court has spoken on this question twice recently, holding that Google's use of parts of Oracle's Java programming language to build the Android operating system was transformative, but that the licensing of a Andy Warhol work based on a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith was not transformative of Goldsmith's work. Also important and perhaps most on-point is a decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that Google's Image Search system is transformative of the photographs it indexes and displays as thumbnails.

To help understand this case Professors Charles Duan from the American University Washington College of Law and Zvi Rosen of the Simmons School of Law at Southern Illinois University was joined by Steven Tepp of Sentinel Worldwide, who is also a Lecturer at the George Washington University School of Law and formerly of the U.S. Copyright Office. John Moran of Holland & Knight moderated the panel and provided additional perspective.