News outlets seek court sanctions against OpenAI in copyright case
What's the story
The New York Times and the Daily News have accused OpenAI of concealing evidence in a high-profile copyright case. The lawsuit, which has been ongoing for two years, alleges that OpenAI violated copyright law by training its generative AI models on The Times's content. The plaintiffs allege that ChatGPT outputs reproduce their journalism without permission.
Defense strategy
The controversy surrounding OpenAI's internal searches
OpenAI has defended itself by claiming it can't search its own training corpus. The company also argued that searching or producing its massive collection of ChatGPT conversations would be technically burdensome and raise user-privacy concerns. However, during an April court-ordered deposition, OpenAI data privacy engineer Vinnie Monaco allegedly revealed that the company had already conducted internal searches and evaluations of its training corpus for copyrighted journalism works.
Internal tools
'Bloom' filter and Project Giraffe
Monaco's deposition also allegedly revealed that OpenAI had created a database of about 78 million de-identified ChatGPT conversations before The Times filed its lawsuit. The company was using this database internally to assess how much it was infringing on others' works. Additionally, OpenAI allegedly implemented a "Bloom" filter as part of a set of tools called "Project Giraffe," which detected and kept track of regurgitation in outputs soon after the lawsuit was filed.
Sample issues
OpenAI allegedly deleted billions of outputs after being sued
The plaintiffs had initially requested a sample of 120 million chat logs from OpenAI. However, the company negotiated to reduce this number to just 20 million. OpenAI submitted the sample to the courts last December but allegedly redacted so much information that it became "unusable" in the court's words. The plaintiffs also claimed that OpenAI deleted billions of ChatGPT outputs after they filed suit, violating a court's preservation order.
Legal action
Plaintiffs want to punish OpenAI for the alleged misconduct
The New York Times and the Daily News are now asking the judge to punish OpenAI for allegedly hiding evidence and interfering with the discovery process. They want the court to bar OpenAI from using its 20 million chat log sample as evidence, claiming it's unreliable. They also want the court to accept that ChatGPT logs would have shown major regurgitation and grounding of their content.
Response
OpenAI has denied all allegations
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri denied the allegations, accusing The New York Times of attempting to access private user conversations as its case weakens. He said, "As the Times's case weakens and they've been forced to drop claims against us, they're persisting with their efforts to invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case." He added that OpenAI will continue defending user privacy and fair use principles.