Decisions, Decisions The New York Times is weighing a lawsuit against OpenAI over intellectual property infringement, NPR reports. Per NPR, the NYT and OpenAI have been in the throes of heated negotiations for weeks, in an attempt to reach a deal that would grant OpenAI a licensing deal to access to the NYT’s vast content library. But those negotiations apparently haven’t been going as planned, and the newspaper’s lawyers, behind closed doors, are now exploring the possibility of legal action against the hype-rich Silicon Valley firm. From where we’re sitting? It looks like the NYT might have some real leverage here. And if OpenAI were to lose such a high-profile case, the AI lawsuit floodgates would almost certainly fly open. High Price According to NPR’s sources, the NYT isn’t just viewing OpenAI and its chatbot ChatGPT as a tool, per se. Its primary concern is that OpenAI, armed with troves of data scraped from the web and able to churn out text accordingly, is actually a direct competitor. And while it’s one thing to have a more traditional competitor — another newspaper, online publishing — it’s wholly another to find yourself directly competing with a scraped data-trained plagiarism engine that’s likely remixing your reporting, among others’, for profit. And as NPR points out, if a federal judge were to find that OpenAI had improperly vacuumed up any of the paper’s material into its AI training data, the copyright penalties could be incredibly destructive for the AI firm. Federal law mandates that…The New York Times Is Apparently Considering a Lawsuit Against OpenAI