New York Times and Daily News accuse OpenAI of hiding evidence in copyright trial

The New York Times and The Daily News have filed a motion in court accusing OpenAI of hiding evidence in an ongoing copyright lawsuit. The publishers claim that OpenAI misrepresented its ability to search customer chat log data and training datasets for their copyrighted works. This is the latest escalation in a two-year-old lawsuit against the AI firm for allegedly violating copyright law by training its generative AI models on the Times’ content and reproducing that journalism in user outputs.

Throughout the case, OpenAI argued that it lacked the capability to search its own training corpus. It also contended that searching or producing its massive collection of ChatGPT conversations would be technically burdensome and would raise user-privacy concerns due to the need to retrieve, process, and de-identify the logs. The outlets sought that data to determine whether their copyrighted journalism was present in OpenAI’s training dataset and whether and how often ChatGPT generated responses using or reproducing their content.

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 look for copyrighted journalism works. Monaco’s deposition also allegedly disclosed that, even before the NYT filed its lawsuit, OpenAI had amassed a database of about 78 million de-identified ChatGPT conversations it used internally to assess how much it was infringing on others’ works. Additionally, after the lawsuit was filed, OpenAI implemented a so-called “Bloom” filter as part of a set of tools called “Project Giraffe,” which detected and kept a record of regurgitation in outputs.

These last two revelations are particularly significant. The plaintiffs originally requested a sample of 120 million chat logs, but OpenAI negotiated the sample down to just 20 million. OpenAI submitted that sample to the courts last December, but it allegedly contained so many redactions that the court deemed it “unusable.” The plaintiffs also claim OpenAI deleted billions of ChatGPT outputs after the suit was filed, directly violating a court preservation order, and substituted millions of logs in the requested sample.

“If OpenAI genuinely believed that copying our clients’ journalism was fair and legal, it wouldn’t have hid the truth about having done it,” Ian B. Crosby, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement. Now, the NYT and The Daily News ask the judge to discipline OpenAI for allegedly withholding evidence and interfering with discovery. They request that the court prevent OpenAI from using the 20 million chat log sample as evidence, accept as fact that ChatGPT logs would have shown substantial regurgitation, prevent OpenAI from arguing that its provided logs don’t demonstrate such regurgitation, and order OpenAI to pay legal fees for the discovery efforts.

In a statement, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri denied the allegations, accusing the Times of trying to access private user conversations as its case weakens. “As the Times’ 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, including by making these blatantly false allegations,” Pusateri said. “We’ll continue defending our users’ privacy and the long-established principles of fair use.”