Lawyers for The New York Times, the Daily News and other newspapers Tuesday asked a Manhattan judge to reject an effort by OpenAI and Microsoft to dismiss parts of their lawsuits accusing the tech giants of stealing reporters’ stories to train their AI products.

A coalition of news organizations led by The New York Times claim the exploitation of their online news stories to train artificial intelligence-driven chatbots amounts to copyright infringement.

In three consolidated suits, publishers allege that OpenAI broke copyright law by copying millions of articles without permission or payment. OpenAI counters that the fair use doctrine protects them.

Oral arguments began in federal court on Wednesday in a case between a coalition of news organizations led by The New York Times and OpenAI, the creator of the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT,

The case has merged lawsuits from three publishers: The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. The publishers argue that OpenAI's practices amount to copyright infringement on a massive scale, potentially threatening the future of journalism.

In a recent legal proceeding, Microsoft and OpenAI defended their practice of using large amounts of online news content to train their AI models. The companies urged the court to dismiss lawsuits from news organizations like The New York Times and New York Daily News,

The maker of ChatGPT hopes to spur investment from the Middle East and avoid strict regulations on the development of new technologies.

"The New York Times" and other publishers have sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, saying they did not grant the ChatGPT-maker the right to use their material.

The lawsuit calls for the destruction of ChatGPT's dataset, a move that could deal a major blow to OpenAI as it would have to rebuild its dataset using only authorized works. Federal copyright law carries heavy financial penalties, with fines up to $150,000 for each willful infringement.