【明報專訊】IN RECENT YEARS, there has been a global surge in artificial intelligence (AI) usage, which has also sparked intellectual property disputes. In the last week of 2023, the American newspaper New York Times sued OpenAI and its major investor, Microsoft, accusing them of using millions of the newspaper's articles without authorisation to help train chatbots such as ChatGPT, thus infringing on intellectual property rights. The lawsuit has been described as the "first shot" fired by a leading news organisation against a pioneer of the technology industry, opening up a "new front" in the long-standing battle for web interests between the media industry and internet giants. It will have a profound impact on the future of the media ecology as well as AI development.