OpenAI and Microsoft executives privately described their AI products as substitutes for journalism, according to court filings made public on Sept 17 that The New York Times and other news outlets say gut the tech companies’ fair-use defence in a copyright case. OpenAI and Microsoft have argued in the Manhattan federal court case that AI training on millions of newspaper articles is fair use because it transforms copyrighted material and does not compete with news organisations. Previously redacted portions revealed quotes from OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and others that the news organisations say “eviscerate” the fair-use defence. The outlets quoted OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, as saying publishers face an “existential threat” from their products, which are “largely substitutive.” The lawsuit, first filed in 2023, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of articles without permission to train ChatGPT from sources including Ziff Davis publications, the Intercept and the Center for Investigative Reporting. According to the outlets’ Sept 17 filing, Brockman wrote that large language models are “particularly good at predicting text of news articles” and responded “ah, nice” when told OpenAI employees had discovered a “hack” to get around The New York Times’ paywall. Nadella agreed under oath that conversing with chatbots “has substituted... giving you the information right there on the website on the AI platform versus needing to go to the underlying source.”