The lawsuits were never love-fests, but rather copyright battles between The New York Times and OpenAI And Microsoft is becoming particularly controversial. This week, the Times alleged that OpenAI engineers inadvertently deleted data that the newspaper's team had spent more than 150 hours extracting as potential evidence.
OpenAI was able to recover most of the data, but the Times' legal team says it is still missing the original file names and folder structure. according to a Announcement In a court filing Wednesday by the newspaper's lawyer Jennifer B. Maisel, this means the information “cannot be used to determine where news plaintiffs copied articles” in OpenAI's artificial intelligence model. Must have been included.
“We disagree with the characterization made and will be filing our response soon,” OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom told WIRED in a statement. The New York Times declined to comment.
The Times filed its own copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft last year, alleging that the companies illegally used its articles to train artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT. case one Many ongoing legal battles between AI companies and publishers, including a similar suit filed by the Daily News, are being handled by some of the same lawyers.
The Times case is currently in discovery, meaning both sides are handing over requested documents and information that could become evidence. As part of the process, OpenAI was required by the court to show its training data to the Times, which is a big deal — OpenAI has never publicly disclosed what information it uses to create its AI models. Was done. To uncover this, OpenAI created what the court is calling a “sandbox” of two “virtual machines” that Times lawyers could investigate. In his announcement, Maisel said that OpenAI engineers had “erased” the data held by the Times team on one of these machines.
According to Maisel's filing, OpenAI acknowledged that the information had been removed, and attempted to resolve the problem shortly after being alerted earlier this month. But when the newspaper's lawyers looked at the “restored” data, it was very disorganized, forcing them to “reconstruct their work using significant person-hours and computer processing time,” according to several other Times stories. The lawyers said. a letter The filing was made before the judge the same day as Maisel's announcement.
The lawyers noted that they had “no reason to believe” that the deletions were “deliberate”. In an email presented as an exhibit along with Maisel's letter, OpenAI attorney Tom Gorman Specified Erasing data as “mess”.