U.S. government supports OpenAI copyright litigation, saying AI training is protected by "fair use"

On September 3, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. government filed a document with the court to support OpenAI's position in copyright disputes with publishers such as The New York Times, arguing that using news content to train artificial intelligence models is consistent with the "fair use" in U.S. copyright law.(fair use) principle. The U.S. Department of Justice said in the document that restricting AI companies from using copyrighted content to train large-language models would violate the basic principles of copyright law and hinder innovation and scientific progress. The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in December 2023, accusing ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot of using large amounts of Times content to train models and generate answers. The U.S. government claims that AI training is "highly transformative" for original works and will not harm the market value of copyrighted works; if fair use rules are tightened, it may result in only large technology companies being able to pay licensing fees and weaken the competitiveness of the U.S. AI industry. Relevant parties are expected to submit a new motion after completing the exchange of evidence, requesting the court to rule on some core disputes.