On December 27, The New York Times Company sued Microsoft and OpenAI for violations of their copyright. The Times contends that training chatbots on its content in order to create an information competitor is a violation of its copyright. This suit is sure to bring up a number of old copyright issues that were never resolved, plus some new that need to be worked through.

The fact is, the big search engines have been violating copyright from the very beginning. All search engines are in fact derivative works of the sites that they crawl, index, and dish out. Most search engines even provide excerpts from the sites they scan. However, most copyright holders have turned a blind eye to this for two main reasons — nobody has deep enough pockets to fight big tech and most of the people whose copyright was violated actually benefitted from the violation. At the end of the day, The New York Times Company wants people to find its content, and, if it means pretending not to notice that Google and Microsoft are essentially storing full backups of their content and using it in their products, then that is what they did.

Now, with AI chatbots, the incentives are aligned differently. Here, the chatbot is serving as a replacement for the content.  Therefore, users are staying at the chat site, and not leaving to produce revenue for the content producers. However, the issue is also less clear in this case. The AI models are certainly reading the Internet, but they aren’t storing it verbatim. The chatbots might be regurgitating the information but it isn’t necessarily giving back the exact wording that was on the website.

Because of these considerations, the issue is quite a bit murkier. Humans, at least, are allowed to learn from other people’s content. If I personally read a story on The New York Times, I can republish the information contained within it to my heart’s content. I’m not even legally required to cite my source. As long as I put the information in my own words, using the information myself and even for my own gain is perfectly legal. As an example, this very article relies on the existence of The New York Times Company lawsuit, the fact of which I myself read about in The New York Times. I included a link to the original article out of courtesy, but I was under no obligation to do so. And, as for the style, humans learn the basic forms of art from other humans, including by reading The New York Times. People who are regular readers will have their speech and thought patterns influenced by what is written there. Again, replicating the style, as long as the content itself is generated from you, is still legitimate.

So, although AI chatbots represent a larger threat to typical publishers and content creators than does search, the case for direct claims of copyright violation is not as clear. While the AI chatbots are clearly using The New York Times, it is neither storing it directly nor replicating it for the user.

Interestingly, this is actually a court case that will likely come down to metaphysics. The question is, what exactly is a human and how does a human differ from a computer? The one leg that the New York Times Company has to stand on is the fact that current artificial intelligence lacks the fundamental personhood categories present in humans, and therefore shouldn’t be treated like one. 

If humans are just meat computers, then either we are all guilty of copyright infringement in the way that the AI chatbots are or the AI chatbots aren’t violating copyright either. However, if humans are indeed not mere computation, if we have a soul, then what is happening in humans is fundamentally different from what is happening in computers. In humans, the soul is being shaped and influenced. In computers, the computer is taking (i.e., stealing) its programming from those web sites.

Ironically, it is the rise of artificial intelligence that has caused humanity to wrestle with metaphysical questions. As The New York Times Company is a publicly traded company (NYSE: NYT), we may be running into the strange territory where the advancement of computers has put the fate of stockholders into the hands of theologians.