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NYT Pitchbot > NYT Trained Chatbot

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Do you want a chatbot that answers every question “In an Ohio diner President Biden’s age raises clouds of doubt about Secretary Clinton’s email server”? Because this is how you get a chatbot that answers every question “In an Ohio diner, President Biden’s age raises clouds of doubt about Secretary Clinton’s email server.”

The New York Times is striking back against the threat that artificial intelligence poses to the news industry, filing a federal lawsuit Wednesday against OpenAI and Microsoft seeking to end the practice of using its stories to train chatbots.

You know what else poses a threat to the news industry?

The Times says the companies are threatening its livelihood by effectively stealing billions of dollars worth of work by its journalists, in some cases spitting out Times’ material verbatim to people who seek answers from generative artificial intelligence like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The newspaper’s lawsuit was filed in federal court in Manhattan and follows what appears to be a breakdown in talks between the newspaper and the two companies, which began in April.

Apparently the NYT is in the habit of soliciting story ideas from freelance writers, turning down the freelancer’s idea and then (completely by coincidence I’m sure) running an article that is suspiciously similar to the one pitched by the freelancer. And the Paper of Record has a known record of profiting off the work of employees and freelancers without paying them.

“The argument that we made was the writers got paid for one-time use,” said Mr. Gleick, who worked as a reporter and editor for The Times for 10 years. “We sued The Times because they sold copyrighted work by not just their staff, but also freelance writers. And the correct thing to do would have been to ask the freelance writers for permission and then pay the writers.”

I doubt NYT vs Microsoft will take 17 years to settle, but it should.

Really, a dispute between the P of R and software companies is like watching a wasp land on a nettle. But it also highlights where journalism is in the U.S., and that’s a clickbait paradise, and that’s depressing.

Web traffic is an important component of the paper’s advertising revenue and helps drive subscriptions to its online site. But the outputs from AI chatbots divert that traffic away from the paper and other copyright holders, the Times says, making it less likely that users will visit the original source for the information.

In the interest of fair attribution, I can’t remember who came up with “Been spending most our lives, living in a clickbait paradise,” but it was several years ago, on Twitter and still stuck in my head.

And of course the NYT isn’t the only victim.

The paper’s complaint comes as the number of lawsuits filed against OpenAI for copyright infringement is growing. The company has been sued by several writers — including comedian Sarah Silverman — who say their books were ingested to train OpenAI’s AI models without their permission. In June, more than 4,000 writers signed a letter to the CEOs of OpenAI and other tech companies accusing them of exploitative practices in building chatbots.

So Microsoft etc will find away to pay off the individuals and organizations with enough lawyers to be a nuisance. Everyone else can eat the brioche crumbs they find under the tables at Pret a Manger.

Until the shoggoth takes off its mask.

People who post off-topic comments are shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles.

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