In the courtroom, the New York Times has taken a hard line against OpenAI. The newspaper sued the artificial intelligence startup alongside investor and partner Microsoft, alleging that OpenAI scraped articles without permission or compensation. The Times wants to hold OpenAI and Microsoft responsible for billions of dollars in damages.

At the same time, however, the Times is also embracing OpenAI’s generative AI technology.

The Times’s use of the technology came to light thanks to leaked code showing that it developed a tool that would use OpenAI to generate headlines for articles and “help apply The New York Times styleguide” — performing functions that, if applied in the newsroom, are normally undertaken by editors at the newspaper.

“The project you’re referring to was a very early experiment by our engineering team designed to understand generative A.I. and its potential use cases,” Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander told The Intercept. “In this case, the experiment was not taken beyond testing, and was not used by the newsroom. We continue to experiment with potential applications of A.I. for the benefit of our journalists and audience.”

Media outlets are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence — using large language models, which learn from ingesting text to then generate language — to handle various tasks. AI can be employed, for example, to sort through large data sets.

More public-facing uses of AI have sometimes resulted in embarrassment. Sports Illustrated deleted posts on its........

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