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The New York Times and The Daily News claim that OpenAI has been lying about its ability to search customer chat log data and training datasets for their copyrighted works. It\u2019s the latest escalation in a two-year-old lawsuit against the AI firm<\/a> for allegedly violating copyright law by training its generative AI models on the Times\u2019 content and reproducing that journalism in user outputs.<\/p>\n Throughout the case, OpenAI has argued that it lacked the ability to search its own training corpus. It also argued that searching or producing its massive collection of ChatGPT conversations would be technically burdensome and would raise user-privacy concerns<\/a> because the logs would need to be retrieved, processed, and de-identified. The outlets sought that data to determine whether their copyrighted journalism was present in OpenAI\u2019s training dataset, and whether and how often ChatGPT generated responses using or reproducing their content.<\/p>\n In an April court-ordered deposition, OpenAI data privacy engineer Vinnie Monaco allegedly revealed that OpenAI had already conducted internal searches and evaluations of its training corpus to search for copyrighted journalism works.\u00a0<\/p>\n Monaco\u2019s deposition also allegedly revealed that, beginning before the NYT filed its lawsuit, OpenAI had already amassed a database of about 78 million de-identified ChatGPT conversations that it was using internally to determine how much it was infringing on others\u2019 works. On top of that dataset, OpenAI also allegedly implemented a so-called \u201cBloom\u201d filter as part of a set of tools called \u201cProject Giraffe,\u201d which detected and kept a record of regurgitation in outputs, shortly after the lawsuit was filed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Those last two revelations are particularly significant. The plaintiffs had originally asked OpenAI to provide a sample of 120 million chat logs, but OpenAI had negotiated to bring the sample down to just 20 million. OpenAI finally submitted that sample to the courts last December, but it had allegedly included so many redactions as to render the sample \u201cunusable,\u201d in the court\u2019s words. The plaintiffs also claimed OpenAI deleted billions<\/a> of ChatGPT outputs after they filed suit in direct violation of the court\u2019s preservation order, and that the AI giant substituted millions of logs in the requested sample.\u00a0<\/p>\n In other words, they claim OpenAI made it needlessly difficult to obtain information that the company had already collected.<\/p>\n \u201cIf OpenAI genuinely believed that copying our clients\u2019 journalism was fair and legal, it wouldn\u2019t have hid the truth about having done it,\u201d\u00a0 Ian B. Crosby, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement.<\/p>\n Now, the NYT and The Daily News are asking the judge to discipline OpenAI for allegedly withholding evidence and messing with the discovery process. They are asking the court to prevent OpenAI from using the 20 million chat log sample as evidence, claiming it is unreliable; to accept as fact that ChatGPT logs would have shown major regurgitation and grounding of the plaintiffs\u2019 content; to prevent OpenAI from arguing that its provided chat logs don\u2019t demonstrate substantial regurgitation; and to make OpenAI pay legal fees for having to chase down this evidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n In a statement, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri denied the allegations, accusing the Times of trying to access private user conversations as its case weakens.<\/p>\n \u201cAs the Times\u2019 case weakens and they\u2019ve been forced to drop claims against us, they\u2019re persisting with their efforts to invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case, including by making these blatantly false allegations,\u201d Pusateri said. \u201cWe\u2019ll continue defending our users\u2019 privacy and the long-established principles of fair use.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n