US Department of Justice backs OpenAI in copyright case

The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft because the newspaper believes the companies have illegally used its articles to train their AI language models, such as ChatGPT.

Now the US Department of Justice has officially taken a position on the case, on the side of OpenAI and Microsoft.

The department argues that it may be what is known in American law as "transformative fair use." In short, this means you may use other people's copyrighted material without permission if you use it to create something new and different, rather than just copying it.

The Department of Justice points out that two things should be considered separately: the training of the AI model itself and what the model writes or answers afterward when you use it. According to the department, it is not certain that one automatically makes the other illegal.

The case is important because the outcome could have major significance for how AI companies such as OpenAI may use news articles, books and other copyrighted content to train their models in the future.