The New York Times has sued artificial intelligence company OpenAI and part-owner Microsoft for allegedly using "millions" of the news organisation's articles to train its AI models, including ChatGPT.

In a lawsuit filed in a Manhattan federal court, the New York Times said OpenAI and Microsoft had sought to "free-ride" on its "massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment."

It alleges that when asked about current events, ChatGPT will sometimes generate "verbatim excerpts" from the Times' articles, which cannot be accessed without paying for a subscription.

According to the suit, this means readers can access the New York Times' content without paying for it, reducing the company subscription and advertising revenue as a result.

The Times is seeking damages as well as an order that the companies stop using its content and destroy data already harvested.

Unlike the Times, media groups such as the Associated Press and Germany's Axel Springer have responded to the rise of AI chatbots by signing content deals with OpenAI.

Microsoft, which has invested more than $10bn in OpenAI to date, has incorporated AI into products such as its Bing search engine since the release of ChatGPT last year.

The suit also alleges that Bing produces search results taken from the New York Times website without linking back to the article or including referral links.

The AI models behind ChatGPT were trained for years on online content under the assumption that it was fair to be used without need for compensation, but the lawsuit argues that unlawful use of the Times' work to create AI products threatens the company's ability to provide quality journalism.

"These tools were built with and continue to use independent journalism and content that is only available because we and our peers reported, edited, and fact-checked it at high cost and with considerable expertise," a spokesperson for the Times said.

The lawsuit also shows that the Times unsuccessfully approached OpenAI and Microsoft in April to seek "an amicable resolution" over its copyright.

OpenAI is also facing a class-action lawsuit from best-selling fiction authors including George RR Martin and John Grisham, accusing the company of violating their copyright.

OpenAI, Microsoft and programme site GitHub are also being sued by a group of computing experts who argue their code was used without their permission to train an AI called Copilot.

(Pic: Mario Tama/Getty Images)