New York Times says OpenAI hid evidence in ChatGPT copyright trial

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’s the latest escalation in a two-year 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 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 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’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 search for copyrighted journalism works. 

Monaco’s 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’ works. On top of that dataset, OpenAI also allegedly implemented a “Bloom” filter as part of a set of tools called “Project Giraffe,” which detected and kept a record of regurgitation in outputs, shortly after the lawsuit was filed. 

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 “unusable,” in the court’s words. The plaintiffs also claimed OpenAI deleted billions of ChatGPT outputs after they filed suit in direct violation of the court’s preservation order, and that the AI giant substituted millions of logs in the requested sample. 

In other words, they claim OpenAI made it needlessly difficult to obtain information that the company had already collected.

“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 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’ content; to prevent OpenAI from arguing that its provided chat logs don’t demonstrate substantial regurgitation; and to make OpenAI pay legal fees for having to chase down this evidence. 

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.”