Print, digital news will vanish, only ChatGPT will remain: DNPA to HC

DNPA told the Delhi High Court that if OpenAI continues to use news content without compensation, physical and digital media may vanish, leaving only ChatGPT functioning

The Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) on Tuesday told the Delhi High Court that physical newspapers and online news portals would soon disappear and only OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT would remain operational if large language model (LLM) makers continue to scrape and use content created by newsrooms without any revenue accruing to them.

 

"Physical newspaper circulation has come down drastically. Physical newspapers are disappearing, digital news will disappear, and only ChatGPT will remain. It reduces my incentive to publish," Senior Advocate Rajshekhar Rao, appearing for DNPA, told Justice Amit Bansal of the Delhi High Court.

 

The DNPA’s submissions were made in the ongoing hearing of the copyright and illegal content usage case filed by Asian News International (ANI) against OpenAI. 

 

DNPA, which represents several print and digital media organisations in the country, argued that the moment ChatGPT picks up information from the public domain to train its LLM—without the consent of the news organisation—it amounts to copyright infringement.

 

Storage of such content, even momentarily, would amount to infringement of the rights of the news organisation, the DNPA told the court. 

 

"Storage of an infringing copy itself is infringing. Even if you store it for a transient moment, you are infringing. You cannot use my copyright without my licence," Rao said. He added that even for research purposes, OpenAI must acquire a lawful copy first.

 

"...You have to buy SCC Online to be able to crack it in the privacy of your home for research purposes," he told the court.

 

In the last hearing, intervenors had argued that ANI and ChatGPT were each other’s competitors.

 

“If I ask who the CM of Jammu and Kashmir is, I will get an answer from ChatGPT as well as ANI. They are direct competitors.”

 

ANI Media has filed a case against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, alleging that its content was illegally used to train large language models (LLMs) and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

 

Apart from ANI, several domestic news publishers, media houses, their representative associations, and music labels have sought to intervene in the case as petitioners.