This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.
This podcast is supported by Givewell. With over 1.5 million nonprofits in the US, how do you know which ones could make a big impact with your donation? Try Givewell. They’ve spent over 15 years researching charity. They share that research for free and direct funding to the highest impact opportunities they’ve found in global health and poverty alleviation.
Make a tax deductible donation at givewell.org. First-time donors can have their donation matched up to $100 as long as matching funds last. Select podcast and Hard Fork at checkout.
I got the call about the lawsuit at the funniest possible time. I was on vacation, and I was at a bird sanctuary.
[LAUGHS]
What were you doing in a bird sanctuary?
You know they have these places where you can go see parrots and toucans.
Yeah, aren’t they called zoos?
No, this is like a small specific sanctuary for wounded birds.
Wait, and they’re all wounded too?
Well, some of them are wounded, yes. So they bring them in. They rehabilitate them. They give you these little cups of seeds, and you hold the cups. And then the birds come and land on you and eat the seeds out of your cup.
And was that how you got bird flu this holiday season?
Yes. So I’m walking around. I have two parrots and another bird on me. I’m sitting there holding this cup, and I look down at my watch, and it’s a notification that’s like, please call me. “The New York Times” is suing OpenAI.
Oh, boy.
Oh my gosh.
I’m Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at “The New York Times.”
I’m Casey Newton from Platformer.
And this is “Hard Fork.”
This week, “The New York Times” is suing OpenAI. We’ll tell you what’s at stake. Then Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky joins us to talk about how his company hacked iMessage so that Android users’ green bubbles briefly and gloriously turn blue. And finally, Kevin and I trade our New Year’s tech resolutions.
How was your break, by the way?
Great break. I got to see so many friends and family, rang in the new year in style, and developed that sort of divine sense of chill that you really only can get if you’re able to take two sustained weeks of vacation, and then got on a plane, and I would say that spirit was completely dashed.
What happened?
So I flew out of the Burbank Airport. I did New Year’s in LA, so I was like, I’m going to be a genius. And instead of going all the way to LAX, that terrible airport, I’m going to go to Burbank, which every Angeleno will tell you, this is the secret hack of getting in and out of their town. You go to the little tiny airport in the sort of north of downtown LA.
And I did that. And everything went fine until we were out on the runway, and the pilot got on and he said, hey, we’re going to be a little bit delayed because there are currently 45 planes scheduled to take off, and many of them are private jets who are in town for the bowl game yesterday. And so we sat on the jet for an hour. Because I guess if you’re just rich, you get to take off before any other commercial aircraft. Is that the rule?
Yeah, it’s like at Disney. You can pay to skip the line.
Well, this has radicalized me against billionaires, OK? I thought they were fine before, but if you’re going to take off before me, you got a problem, bucko.
OK, so you got stuck in the Burbank Airport, but you had a good break. I’m glad about that.
I had a great break. And how was your break?
It was great. Yeah, we went we went to the beach. We went to see some friends on the East Coast. I got to read a book. That was my one goal of vacation.
Wow. A whole book?
A whole book.
That’s great.
No, you don’t understand. When you have a toddler —
Now, wait. Was this book “Goodnight Moon“?
[LAUGHS]: It was “Llama Llama Red Pajama.” I read it 47 times. It was the only book my child will allow me to read to him. No, I read a book that was actually recommended to me by your father.
Oh, nice!
Which was “The Wager.” It’s a great book about a shipwreck. And then I read —
By David Grann.
By David Grann. So I finished that. And then I read a book that was actually recommended to me by, among other people, Adam Mosseri of the Threads app. It was called “The Spy and the Traitor.” And it was a good book about a spy during the Cold War.
Wow.
Yeah.
And were they able to catch the traitor? Nope. No spoilers.
No spoilers.
OK, no spoilers.
No spoilers. But it’s very fun. I really like spy novels and movies and books, and it was great.
Yeah, that is great.
All right, let’s make a show.
Let’s make a show.
All right, so, Casey, the big news story that happened over the break that I was alerted to while at a bird sanctuary was that my employer, the company that helps us make this podcast, “The New York Times,” is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, and specifically for using millions of copyrighted “New York Times” articles in the training of AI models, including those that go into ChatGPT and Bing Chat or Copilot, as it’s now called.
Yeah, so I am excited to talk about this. Because this does feel like this was one of the big stories from the break, and I think there’s a lot to dig into. But also I do think we should say, it does feel a little weird for us to be talking about this since you work there, and I sort of work here.
Yeah. Yeah. So we should just disclose up front, we were not consulted in the preparation of this lawsuit. Thank God, because neither of us are copyright lawyers. I found out when the rest of the world did that this was happening. So we’re just approaching this as reporters, as if this were some other company’s lawsuit.
Yeah, we don’t speak for “The Times.” We tried to once, and they wouldn’t let us.
[LAUGHS]: And “The Times” actually declined to send someone to be a guest on the show. Basically, they’re letting this complaint speak for itself. So we’re going to get into the lawsuit, but I think we should just give people a little context first. I mean, we’ve talked on this show about a bunch of lawsuits against generative AI companies that have been filed over the past year. A lot of them involve similar copyright issues. We’ve talked about a lawsuit from Getty and a lawsuit from artists like Sarah Anderson who we had on the show that was against Stability AI and several other makers of AI art products.
But this is the big kahuna. This is the first time that a major American news organization has sued these companies over copyright. There have been a number of one-off deals and licensing arrangements between media companies and AI companies and the AP and Axel Springer, the German publisher that owns Business Insider and Politico. Both have struck licensing deals with OpenAI.
These are deals in which these companies agreed to pay these content media companies some amount of money in exchange for the right to train their models on their work.
That’s right. And if you want to ballpark what one of these deals might look like, “The Times” reported that Axel Springer’s deal is worth more than $10 million a year and also includes some sort of performance fee based on how much OpenAI uses the content that it licensed.
Right. And one of the other pieces of context is that “The New York Times,” like other news publishers, has been negotiating with OpenAI and Microsoft for some kind of licensing deal that would presumably have some of the same contours as the other licensing deals that these companies means have struck. Those talks appear to have broken down or to have stalled out, and so this lawsui