OpenAI accused of misleading court over ChatGPT data in lawsuit filed by publishers: Here is what we know
Follow UsOpenAI is facing new allegations in its ongoing copyright lawsuit with a group of newspapers.
The outlets have accused the AI company of misleading the court about its ability to search its AI systems for their copyrighted content.
The newspapers have asked the court to impose sanctions on OpenAI.
OpenAI is facing new allegations in its ongoing copyright lawsuit with a group of newspapers led by The New York Times and the New York Daily News. In a new court filing, the outlets have accused the AI company of misleading the court about its ability to search its AI systems for their copyrighted content. The filing was submitted to a federal court in Manhattan on Thursday, reports Reuters.
SurveyOpenAI had told the court it could not search its large language models for copies of their articles. The outlets argue that this statement was false because the company had already carried out such searches before the first lawsuit was filed.
The newspapers have asked the court to impose sanctions on OpenAI. They are seeking attorneys’ fees and also want the court to rule that OpenAI’s ChatGPT records show the company used their copyrighted news articles without permission.
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The filing also accuses OpenAI of deleting billions of relevant ChatGPT conversations or making them impossible to search.
OpenAI has previously argued that sharing ChatGPT conversation logs could put users’ privacy at risk. Responding to the latest filing, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri rejected the allegations. He said, “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.”
The legal battle began in 2023 when The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft. The lawsuit claims that the companies used millions of newspaper articles without permission to train the AI model that powers ChatGPT. Last month, however, The New York Times dropped one of its secondary copyright infringement claims in an updated complaint.
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“For over two years, OpenAI lied to The Times, The Daily News Plaintiffs, the public, and the court,” the New York Times’ lead attorney Ian Crosby was quoted as saying in the report. “It claimed searching ChatGPT outputs for copies of The Times’ and the Daily News Plaintiffs’ content was infeasible, burdensome, and invasive of users’ privacy – while at the same time concealing that it had already done such searches.”
New York Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said the motion “asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism.”
The case is one of several lawsuits filed by copyright owners against AI companies. Authors, artists and music labels have also accused companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta of using copyrighted material without permission to train AI models.
