Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft to Kill the AI Snake

The legal firestorm against OpenAI and Microsoft is growing as The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. The publishers allege that these tech giants vacuumed up their proprietary archives, including content hidden behind paywalls, to train models like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing AI without so much as a thank you or a royalty check.

The plaintiffs are demanding a radical remedy: a court order forcing the companies to destroy the stolen data, the training datasets, and the resulting AI models. The lawsuit paints a grim picture, labeling generative AI as a self-cannibalizing snake that devours the very creators required to keep the ecosystem alive. It frames these tools not as innovative creators, but as high-tech predators that feed on human labor to churn out derivative imitations for profit.

This latest legal headache arrives even though Microsoft and OpenAI previously played nice by funding journalism scholarships at The Seattle Times. Microsoft responded with the classic corporate 'surprise,' stating they are open to negotiations, which is PR-speak for 'we hope we can pay you to go away quietly.'

The irony of a company funding scholarships with one hand while allegedly scraping the recipient's life work with the other is peak Silicon Valley altruism. If the courts actually force the deletion of these models, the entire foundation of modern LLMs might just evaporate into a pile of expensive, legally radioactive code.

Source: TechCrunch