OpenAI Responds to New York Times Lawsuit, Claims “Manipulation” – The Hollywood Reporter

OpenAI is firing back at The New York Times after the company was sued for copyright infringement over the use of the publisher’s articles to train its artificial intelligence chatbot.

In a blog post, the Sam Altman-led firm said that the Times is “not telling the full story” and claimed it “intentionally manipulated” prompts to make it appears as if ChatGPT generates near word-for-word excerpts of articles.

“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,” the post states.

OpenAI maintained that such verbatim regurgitation is a “rare bug.” There are guardrails in place to limit “inadvertent memorization,” added the company, which stressed that users are barred under its terms of use from prompting models to produce answers that may violate intellectual property rights.

The blog was issued in response to the Times suing last month over novel copyright issues raised by generative AI in a suit that could have far-reaching implications on the news publishing industry. The publisher presented extensive evidence of products from OpenAI and Microsoft displaying near word-for-word excerpts of articles when prompted, which allegedly go far beyond the snippets of texts typically shown with ordinary search results. One example: Bing Chat copied all but two of the first 396 words of its 2023 article “The Secrets Hamas knew about Israel’s Military.” An exhibit shows 100 other situations in which OpenAI’s GPT was trained on and memorized articles from The Times.

In the post, OpenAI argued that training AI models using the publisher’s articles and other “publicly available internet materials” is fair use.

More to come.