The nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia has a plan to save the open internet, one in which AI chatbots and human artistry can coexist peacefully.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and a dozen other “free knowledge” sites—all collaboratively maintained and edited by an open-source community of human contributors—submitted an amicus brief on Thursday to the court overseeing the New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. Filed in December 2023, that lawsuit alleges that the tech companies illegally used millions of copyrighted articles from the Times to train their AI chatbots, which now compete with the publication as a source of online information. OpenAI and Microsoft have argued that scraping the Times’ content, and of the countless other materials taken from the web to train ChatGPT and Copilot, constitutes fair use under U.S. copyright law.

In its roughly 5,800-word amicus (“friend of the court”) brief, the Wikimedia Foundation makes the case that both of the parties’ positions in the lawsuit are “overbroad,” and ultimately impractical in an age when AI use is only becoming more common. The nonprofit has instead suggested a middle path: AI developers should be able to train their models on content that’s freely available online, but they shouldn’t be allowed to simply reproduce that content however they please, such that human authors and artists lose all incentive to keep contributing their work to the internet.

“Fair use should not be interpreted in a manner that would gatekeep all uses of copied works under proprietary terms to the detriment of efficient innovation,” Wikimedia’s legal team wrote in the amicus brief.

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