The lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement pits one of the great establishment media institutions against the purveyor of a transformative new technology. Symbolically, the case promises a clash of the titans: labor-intensive human newsgathering against pushbutton information produced by artificial intelligence. But legally, the case represents something different: a classic instance of the lag between established law and emerging technology. Copyright law, a set of rules that date back to the printing press, was not designed to cover large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. It…
