The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday edition that The New York Times filed a U.S. federal lawsuit Wednesday against OpenAI and Microsoft seeking to end the practice of using its stories to train chatbots. An Associated Press dispatch to The Globe quotes The Times saying that the companies are threatening its livelihood by effectively stealing billions of dollars worth of work by its journalists, in some cases spitting out Times material verbatim to people who seek answers from generative AI such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. The media is one of many industries that could be upended by the rapid development of AI. Media organizations have already been pummelled by a migration of readers to on-line platforms and while many publications, including The Times, have successfully carved out a digital space, AI could become a significant threat. "These bots compete with the content they are trained on," said Times lawyer Ian Crosby. Artificial intelligence companies scrape information available on-line to train generative AI chatbots. The newspaper has compared its action to a copyright lawsuit more than two decades ago against file-sharing player Napster. The record companies won and Napster was soon gone.