OpenAI Seeks to DismissParts of The New York Times’s Lawsuit

Representatives for OpenAI and the Times Company did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The motion asked the court to dismiss four claims from The Times’s complaint to narrow the focus of the lawsuit. OpenAI’s lawyers argued that The Times should not be allowed to sue for acts of reproduction that occurred more than three years ago and that the paper’s claim that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an amendment to U.S. copyright law passed in 1998 after the rise of the internet, was not legally sound.

The Times was the first major American media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Novelists, computer programmers and other groups have also filed copyright suits against the start-up and other companies that build generative A.I., technologies that generate text, images and other media from short prompts.

Like other A.I. companies, OpenAI built its technology by feeding it enormous amounts of digital data, some of which is likely copyrighted. A.I. companies have claimed that they can legally use such material to train their systems without paying for it because it is public and they are not reproducing the material in its entirety.

In its suit, The Times included examples of OpenAI’s technology reproducing excerpts from its articles almost verbatim. In the motion to dismiss, lawyers for OpenAI accused The Times of paying someone to hack their chatbot. “It took them tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results,” the motion said.