The Denver Post and seven other newspapers sued Microsoft and OpenAI on Tuesday, claiming the technology giants illegally harvested millions of copyrighted articles to create their cutting-edge “generative” artificial intelligence products including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot. While the newspapers’ publishers have spent billions of dollars to send “real people to real places to report on real events in the real world,” the two tech firms are “purloining” the papers’ reporting without compensation “to create products that provide news and information plagiarized and stolen,” according to the lawsuit in federal court. “We can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense,” said Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, which own seven of the newspapers.