The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, arguing that the AI companies unlawfully scraped protected work to train the generative AI models that would eventually be used to build a competing product. New reporting from The Intercept, however, reveals that the NYT has meanwhile experimented with applying OpenAI’s AI tools in the newsroom. According to the Intercept — which is also suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement — the NYT’s OpenAI experimentation was revealed last month after a massive chunk of the NYT’s GitHub data was anonymously leaked on 4Chan. (As the Intercept notes, the NYT confirmed to BleepingComputer that the leak was legitimate.) Within this massive breach — over three million files were stolen across 6,000 GitHub repositories — the Intercept uncovered more than one AI project, including one dubbed “OpenAI Styleguide.” In that effort, the newspaper explored ways to use OpenAI’s DaVinci to perform tasks like generating headlines and applying the paper’s style guide to a story. Elsewhere, a separate, self-started effort from a staffer during the paper’s “Maker Week” utilized OpenAI’s ChatGPT to draft headlines as well. Which, right now, are tasks that are still generally performed by human journalists. Another project, this one unfinished, was intended to automatically generate “counterpoints” to opinion articles — a section of the NYT that’s often been the source of drama at the newspaper in recent years. As the report notes, nowhere on the NYT’s Research and Development page — where it discusses two dozen use cases for AI and machine learning within its…Leak Reveals the New York Times Experimented With Using AI to Write Headlines