The New York Times has initiated a legal action against OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for allegedly violating their copyright in order to train the system.
The suit, of which Microsoft is also a defendant, claims that both companies should be liable for "billions of dollars" in damages.
ChatGPT and other LLMs acquire knowledge by scrutinizing immense quantities of data, generally obtained from the internet.
The BBC has sought responses from OpenAI and Microsoft.
The lawsuit alleges that "millions" of articles published by the New York Times have been utilized without authorization to refine ChatGPT, and that the tool is now in competition with the newspaper as a reliable source of data.
It claims that when queried on recent news, ChatGPT produces "word-for-word excerpts" from New York Times stories that are not free to access without a subscription.
The lawsuit maintains that because readers can get New York Times content without needing to pay for it, this leads to a loss of subscription revenue and a decrease in ad clicks on the website.
Using the example of the Bing search engine, it was indicated that some features are powered by ChatGPT. However, the results for searches on the engine came from a New York Times-owned website without providing any links to the article or referral links that would generate income.
Microsoft has expended in excess of $10 billion (£7.8 billion) on OpenAI.
On Wednesday, a Manhattan federal court was presented with a lawsuit that uncovered the New York Times's unsuccessful attempt to contact Microsoft and OpenAI in April in order to draft an agreeable resolution regarding a copyright infringement.
A period of tumult-filled days at OpenAI came to a close one month ago, culminating in the unanticipated firing and eventual rehiring of co-founder and CEO Sam Altman.
The dismissal of him surprised people in the industry and caused employees to threaten to all quit if he wasn't brought back.
In addition to the internal matters, the company has multiple lawsuits filed against it as of 2023.
A copyright infringement lawsuit involving US authors such as George RR Martin (author of Game of Thrones) and John Grisham was filed in September.
After comedian Sarah Silverman initiated legal proceedings in July, authors Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman wrote an open letter which same month, demanding compensation from AI companies for incorporating their writing.
OpenAI is also entangled in legal action together with Microsoft and programming website GitHub from a grouping of computing specialists who maintain that their code was implemented without their authorization to instruct an AI titled Copilot.
In addition to these events, there have been numerous lawsuits involving developers of generative AI - i.e. AI that is able to produce media when given text cues - such as when artists disputed the operations of two text-to-image engines, Stability AI and Midjourney, in January, asserting that they only work when fed copyrighted artwork.
None of these legal cases have been settled yet.
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