New York Times on 'Wrong Side of History', OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says at NYT Event

By Jason Nelson

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the lawsuit by the New York Times against the ChatGPT developer for copyright infringement puts the storied publication on the wrong side of history, amid persistent questions about how the media industry should contend with the rise of AI.

Altman’s comments came during an interview with the New York Times journalist and host Andrew Ross Sorkin at the newspaper’s annual DealBook Summit in New York City on Wednesday.

The lawsuit, filed in December, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of using New York Times articles to train AI models without obtaining proper licensing or permission. While Altman avoided going into specifics, he addressed the topic broadly—and took aim at the paper.

“I don't believe in showing up in someone else's house as a guest and being rude,” Altman said. “But I will say, I think the New York Times is on the wrong side of history in many ways.”

In response to those allegations Ian Crosby, Susman Godfrey partner and lead counsel for The New York Times told Decrypt Altman "correctly recognized that writers, photographers, artists, and other creators deserve to be paid for the work they create."

"What he misses is that's precisely why copyright law exists, and there’s a way to build new technologies that complies with the law and the rights of copyright holders," they said. "History has repeatedly shown that it is entirely possible to do both."

Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are trained on massive datasets—including books, websites, and articles—to learn language patterns and structures. While LLMs don’t retain specific articles, the New York Times claimed that OpenAI paid particular attention to their articles.

“While defendants engaged in wide-scale copying from many sources, they gave Times content particular emphasis when building their LLMs—revealing a preference that recognizes the value of those works,” attorneys for the New York Times said in the complaint.

In January, OpenAI pushed back against the New York Times' claims, saying that the newspaper was not telling the full story. The AI giant suggested that the Times tailored its prompts to make ChatGPT generate responses that would prove its claims.

“It seems they intentionally manipulated prompts, often including lengthy excerpts of articles, in order to get our model to regurgitate,” OpenAI said. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way the New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts.”

The New York Times’ lawsuit is one of several targeting OpenAI for copyright infringement. Others suing OpenAI for copyright infringement include “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, the Authors Guild, and comedian Sarah Silverman.

On Monday, a federal judge granted a motion by attorneys for the Authors Guild to compel OpenAI to produce text messages and direct messages on X (formerly Twitter) of OpenAI employees who used the social media platform for work purposes.

To help prevent future copyright infringement disputes over AI, Altman called for a fair system to compensate creators for the use of their work and likeness. He suggested an opt-in model where creators could earn micropayments whenever their name, likeness, or style is used to generate content.

“I think the discussion on fair use or not is at the wrong level,” Altman told the DealBook audience Wednesday. “Of course, we very much believe in: You need one of these right-to-learn approaches. But the part I really agree with is we need to find new economic models where creators can have new revenue streams.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward

Editor's note: Adds response from the New York Times

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