New York Times sues Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI over copyright infringement. Photo: NBC News

The NYT said in a filing with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that it seeks to hold Microsoft and OpenAI to account for the “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” it believes it is owed for the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”

The newspaper is one of numerous media organizations pursuing compensation from companies behind some of the most advanced general artificial intelligence models, for the alleged usage of their content to train AI programs.

OpenAI is the creator of GPT, a large language model that can produce humanlike content in response to user prompts. It does this thanks to billions of parameters’ worth of data, which is obtained from public web data up until 2021.

This has created a dilemma for media publishers and creators, which are finding their content being used and reimagined by generative AI models like ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. In numerous cases, the content produced by these programs can look similar to the source material.

OpenAI has tried to allay news publishers' concerns. In December, the company announced a partnership with Axel Springer — the parent company of Business Insider, Politico, and European outlets Bild and Welt — which would license its content to OpenAI in return for a fee.

The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

In its lawsuit Wednesday, the Times accused Microsoft and OpenAI of creating a business model based on “mass copyright infringement,” stating that the companies’ AI systems were “used to create multiple reproductions of The Times’s intellectual property for the purpose of creating the GPT models that exploit and, in many cases, retain large portions of the copyrightable expression contained in those works.”

CNBC has reached out to Microsoft and OpenAI for comment.