Two veteran Greek American journalists are suing OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft Corp. for stealing and repurposing a lifetime of their work.
Nicholas Gage, 84, and Nicholas Basbanes, 81, who live near each other in the same Massachusetts town, each devoted decades to reporting, writing and book authorship.
Gage poured his tragic family story and search for the truth about his mother’s death into a bestselling memoir that led John Malkovich to play him in the 1985 film “Eleni.” Basbanes transitioned his skills as a daily newspaper reporter into writing widely-read books about literary culture.
Basbanes was the first of the duo to try fiddling with AI chatbots, finding them impressive but prone to falsehoods and lack of attribution. The friends commiserated and filed their lawsuit earlier this year, seeking to represent a class of writers whose copyrighted work they allege “has been systematically pilfered by” OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft.
The suit from Gage and Basbanes said that “until recently, ChatGPT provided verbatim quotes of copyrighted text.”
“Currently, it instead readily offers to produce summaries of such text,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. “These summaries themselves are derivative works, the creation of which is inherently based on the original unlawfully copied work.”
Journalists and writers join the campaign against OpenAI
Now their lawsuit is subsumed into a broader case seeking class-action status led by household names like John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” novelist George R. R. Martin; and proceeding under the same New York federal judge who’s hearing similar copyright claims from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones.
What links all the cases is the claim that OpenAI — with help from Microsoft’s money and computing power — ingested huge troves of human writings to “train” AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works.
“If they can get it for nothing, why pay for it?” Gage said. “But it’s grossly unfair and very harmful to the written word.”
The cases are still in the discovery stage and scheduled to drag into 2025. In the meantime, some who believe their professions are threatened by AI business practices have tried to secure private deals to get technology companies to pay a fee to license their archives. Others are fighting back.
“Somebody had to go out and interview real people in the real world and conduct real research by poring over documents and then synthesizing those documents and coming up with a way to render them in clear and simple prose,” said Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group, publisher of dozens of newspapers including the Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pioneer Press. The newspaper chain sued OpenAI in April.
“All of that is real work, and it’s work that AI cannot do,” Pine said. “An AI app is never going to leave the office and go downtown where there’s a fire and cover that fire.”
