Lawsuit Against Microsoft Cites Bing’s AI Chatbot In Counterargument

A lawsuit filed against Microsoft by the Aliotto and Joseph Saverii law firm argues that the company’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard should be blocked. This is the same “Gamers lawsuit”, which infamously was filed by a group of 10 gamers against Microsoft. In a new 38-page document, the lawyers, who are allegedly backed by Sony, detail new arguments but make one crucial mistake.

In this document, the lawsuit against Microsoft uses its own Bing AI chatbot against it. The plaintiffs generated evidence against Microsoft using the AI, which is based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The lawyers used Bing to generate reasons why Microsoft is buying AAA developers and the AI’s response seems to be a commonsense answer, that anyone with 2 brain cells could understand and come up with on their own. 

Note, this is arguing to support the idea that AAA games are important for video game publishers, which is common sense, however, the lawyers present this as if it is some esoteric idea. Pasta is important with spaghetti, and peanut butter goes with jelly, right? The lawyers use the Bing AI to “prove” that AAA games are important to gaming platforms and are important to Microsoft. 

It should be noted that Bing AI searches the web to generate answers, unlike ChatGPT whose training data is limited up to a certain date. This means that some answers could be influenced by Sony’s own arguments, as they can easily be found online, and would be web scraped by the AI. 

Legal analyst Florian Mueller breaks down the absurdity of this juncture in a Twitter thread, and why it is likely to fail. 

Here are my key and high-level observations on the renewed motion for a preliminary injunction against #Microsoft–#ActivisionBlizzard. This is an oversized tweet thanks to #TwitterBlue.

For further detail, see the 32-part thread (a link is at the bottom of this post), in which I…

— Florian Mueller (@FOSSpatents) April 25, 2023

Final decisions from major regulators regarding the Activision Blizzard deal are coming soon. This Wednesday, the UK’s CMA is expected to approve the deal. The EU will make a final decision by the end of May. Lawmakers in the US have begun probing the deal, putting pressure from Congress on antitrust regulators to support Microsft’s bid to acquire Activision-Blizzard.

Sony is putting pressure on regulators around the world to block the deal from going through, citing concerns of anti-competitiveness over Microsoft owning the Call of Duty franchise. Sony is worried that Microsoft could eventually make the franchise exclusive to Xbox, or make some features unavailable to other platforms. These concerns were also initially shared by some regulators.