We’re suing ChatGPT. Will you chip in $5?

It’s no secret that this is a tough time for journalism. One in four newsroom jobs disappeared between 2008 and 2020, and since the Covid-19 pandemic, things have only gotten worse.

But now we’re facing an all new existential threat: artificial intelligence.

Big Tech companies like OpenAI have spent years training programs like ChatGPT on the copyright-protected stories of news organizations. And now these companies think they can replace the work of actual human journalists with AI-generated “news” articles.

If we don’t fight back, the logical endpoint is the complete hollowing out of the journalism profession, leaving the public with only bot-generated nonsense as news. That dystopian future will be here sooner than you may realize.

That’s why The Intercept has filed a federal lawsuit against OpenAI — and we’re asking you, our readers, to stand with us by making a donation today.

Our lawsuit alleges that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, by training ChatGPT on our work while stripping out credit for The Intercept and our reporters.

OpenAI not only used copyright-protected news stories to create ChatGPT, but also programmed ChatGPT to pass off its responses as its own. According to research organization Copyleaks, nearly 60 percent of GPT-3.5 responses contained plagiarized content.

Had OpenAI trained ChatGPT using these works as they were published, including author, title, and copyright information, ChatGPT may have learned to at least inform ChatGPT users that it was providing responses that were based on the copyrighted works of others.

Instead, OpenAI removed that information from its ChatGPT training sets, in violation of the DMCA, and garnered billions in investment and revenue because of AI products fundamentally created with and trained on copyright-protected material.

Let’s be clear: This fight is about so much more than just protecting The Intercept’s copyrighted material. It’s about saving the future of journalism. Because if we allow a mass displacement of working human journalists by AI, then democracy itself is in mortal danger. Facts, truth, and reality will simply become the output of an algorithm programmed to benefit the richest, most powerful corporations in the world.

We cannot let that happen. That’s why The Intercept is using every legal tool available to resist that dystopian future, and today we’re asking you to stand with us.

Will you make a donation to The Intercept today?

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