After being sued last month for “billions of dollars”, OpenAI says in blog post letter that The New York Times is not telling the full story.

In late December, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner and investor, Microsoft, for allegedly violating copyright law by training generative AI models on the Times’ content, requesting “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.” Yesterday, OpenAI responded publicly, claiming that the lawsuit is meritless, and that The New York Times is not telling the full story.

In a letter published on OpenAI’s official blog, the company claims that “[t]raining AI models using publicly available internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents” and that the principle is viewed by them as “fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and critical for US competitiveness.”

They also noted that the model’s tendency to regurgitate training data – as raised by The Times’ complaint – “is a rare bug that we are working to drive to zero”.

But the most notable section of the letter is the fourth section, titled “The New York Times is not telling the full story”, where OpenAI notes: “Our discussions with The New York Times had appeared to be progressing constructively through our last communication on December 19. The negotiations focused on a high-value partnership around real-time display with attribution in ChatGPT, in which The New York Times would gain a new way to connect with their existing and new readers, and our users would gain access to their reporting.”

They also indicated how they learned about the lawsuit on December 27: “by reading The New York Times”.

Continuing, the letter stated: “Along the way, they had mentioned seeing some regurgitation of their content but repeatedly refused to share any examples, despite our commitment to investigate and fix any issues. We’ve demonstrated how seriously we treat this as a priority, such as in July when we took down a ChatGPT feature immediately after we learned it could reproduce real-time content in unintended ways.”

The letter also notes that “the regurgitations…induced appear to be from years-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third–party websites, and that “[i]t seems they intentionally manipulated prompts, often including lengthy excerpts of articles, in order to get our model to regurgitate. Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts… Despite their claims, this misuse is not typical or allowed user activity, and is not a substitute for The New York Times.”

OpenAI also stated that they regard the lawsuit “to be without merit”, while stating that they are “hopeful for a constructive partnership with The New York Times and respect its long history”.

Having already seen several other copyright lawsuits (including this one from a famous comedienne), it seems that the copyright battleground will have a significant impact on how we use AI models like ChatGPT in the future.

So, what do you think? Do you think The Times’ case has merit? Or is OpenAI correct in saying it’s fair use? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot lawyer addressing the jury”.

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