New York Times updates lawsuit, accuses Microsoft of building a supercomputer to scrape its content

The New York Times, which became the first major publisher to sue a generative AI company in December 2023, has updated its lawsuit to target Microsoft instead of OpenAI. The new complaint accuses Microsoft of building a supercomputer specifically for OpenAI to scrape content from the Times and other sites without permission, training AI models with it. The system not only provides computing power but also helps pick and grab copyrighted works, giving the Times' content higher priority. Court documents show users asked ChatGPT to bypass the Times' paywall, getting full article sections. In some cases, the model output text nearly identical to the original, hurting the Times' subscription business.