The New York Times has filed a civil lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in Federal District Court in Manhattan Wednesday, claiming that the technology companies used the newspaper’s content to train its artificial intelligence, breaching copyright protections.

The Times does not ask for a specific dollar amount but says that the lawsuit, “seeks to hold them (the defendants) responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”

Neither company has responded to the lawsuit publicly. USA Today has reached out to both Microsoft and OpenAI and will update this story if we receive a response.

Computational linguistics focuses on developing advanced language models capable of understanding and generating human language. This dynamic field integrates the latest in machine learning and artificial intelligence, striving to create models that grasp the intricacies of language. A crucial aspect of this discipline is adapting these models to accommodate the ever-changing nature of language, influenced by cultural, social, and technological shifts.

One major issue in this area is the temporal misalignment between the data used to train language models and the ever-evolving nature of language. Over time, the language used in various domains can change significantly, which leads to the models trained on past data becoming less effective. This problem is compounded by the fact that acquiring and integrating new, relevant data into these models is often complex and resource-intensive.

Current methods to tackle this challenge primarily involve updating language models with new data as it becomes available. Techniques like dynamic evaluation and continuous pretraining keep these models relevant over time. However, these approaches have limitations, such as the risk of models forgetting previously learned information or requiring extensive new data for effective updating.

I created an experimental chatbot with 50 of my WIRED articles. Try it out for yourself.

This will go down as the year of AI.

A system that detects forces and interprets which stimuli have the potential to cause harm could imbue robots with a sense akin to pain.

By Alex Wilkins