OpenAI and Microsoft Lawsuit: Nearly 400 Local Newspapers Sue

Ah, nearly 400 local newspaper publishers have clubbed together to sue OpenAI and Microsoft. Because nothing says 'we're standing up for journalism' like discovering your life's work has been scraped into a chatbot that speaks in bland corporate platitudes. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft copied reporting to train ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot while 'stripping away copyright management information' — which is a fancy way of saying they nicked the bylines too. At this rate, soon the only journalism left will be written by the very models that killed the industry.

Let's be honest: the publishers have a point. These are local papers, the ones that actually cover school board meetings and zoning disputes. And their reward? Being turned into training data for a machine that generates generic articles and tells users 'I can't provide that information.' The lawsuit demands compensation for the unauthorized use of their work, but we all know how this goes: after years of legal wrangling, the AI companies will settle for a fraction of the damages, promise to 'respect copyright' going forward, and then quietly find a loophole. Meanwhile, the publishers will have spent millions on lawyers.

But hey, at least the AI companies are following the Silicon Valley playbook to the letter: ask for forgiveness, not permission. And if forgiveness is too expensive, just stall until the law catches up — which, given the pace of AI regulation, means sometime around the heat death of the universe. The joke's on the publishers, really. They should have been charging rent for the space their words occupy in the model's weights. That's the kind of innovation we need.