We’re suing ChatGPT. Will you donate $5?

It’s no secret that the news industry is struggling. Last year was among the worst ever, with over 3,000 jobs eliminated across print, broadcast, and digital outlets — and so far 2024 has been even worse, with 2,184 layoffs in just the first quarter alone.

But now, journalists are facing what could be our biggest threat yet: artificial intelligence.

For-profit news outlets are already replacing the work of paid human journalists with AI robots, and even publishing entire news stories under fake bylines. If we don’t fight back, the logical dystopian endpoint is the complete hollowing out of the journalism profession.

Here’s the rub: Big Tech companies like OpenAI built the tools that are being used to replace human journalists by feeding them massive amounts of copyright-protected work without providing credit — and we allege that this is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.

We’ve filed a lawsuit against OpenAI to fight back, and we’re asking you to stand with us by making a donation today. Will you chip in $5?

Our lawsuit alleges that OpenAI violated the 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 the 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 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: 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.

Will you donate $5 to The Intercept and help support the future of journalism?

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