UPDATED 19:39 EDT / FEBRUARY 27 2024

AI

OpenAI to court: New York Times’ lawsuit used evidence obtained through hacking

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, asked a U.S. federal judge on Monday to dismiss a majority of a copyright lawsuit lodged against it by the New York Times in December, alleging that the Times paid someone to hack its service to create misleading evidence in the case.

In the filing, OpenAI claims that the Times caused the technology to reproduce its material through “deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use.”

“The allegations in the Times’s complaint do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards,” the filing states. “The truth, which will come out in the course of this case, is that the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products.”

OpenAI argued that the 100 examples in the Times lawsuit that supposedly generated several paragraphs of Times content as outputs do not reflect how normal people use ChatGPT and required “tens of thousands of attempts to generate.” OpenAI claimed that the “highly anomalous results” were the result of “targeting and exploiting a bug” that OpenAI claims it is now “committed to addressing.”

“Contrary to the allegations in the complaint, however, ChatGPT is not in any way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times,” OpenAI added in the motion to dismiss most of the Time’s claims. “In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product for that purpose. Nor could they. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”

The NY Times, unsurprisingly, did not agree with OpenAI’s take. Ian Crosby, lead counsel for The New York Times, told Ars Technica that “what OpenAI bizarrely mischaracterizes as ‘hacking’ is simply using OpenAI’s products to look for evidence that they stole and reproduced The Times’s copyrighted works. And that is exactly what we found. In fact, the scale of OpenAI’s copying is much larger than the 100-plus examples set forth in the complaint.”

The new motion is the latest development in the case following OpenAI argument in a blog post in January that the claims made by the Times had no merit. The company argued that even if they had some New York Times content, the use of it was fair use and that the Times’ “content didn’t meaningfully contribute to the training of our existing models and also wouldn’t be sufficiently impactful for future training.”

OpenAI also addressed the Times’ concerns about ChatGPT providing access to paywalled articles. According to OpenAI, the phenomenon is a “rare bug” that it’s currently working to fix. The post went on to claim that “The New York Times is not telling the full story.”

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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