Mohammedia – According to Reuters, OpenAI has petitioned a federal judge in New York to vacate an injunction that orders the company to share 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chat logs, saying this violates user privacy and is well beyond the parameters of a copyright infringement case brought by The New York Times and other news organizations.
In a court filing on Wednesday, OpenAI argued that, should they obey the command, they would end up exposing secret conversations between their users, which are mostly unrelated to the claim at the heart of this matter.
“To be clear: anyone in the world who has used ChatGPT in the past three years must now face the possibility that their personal conversations will be handed over to The Times to sift through at will in a speculative fishing expedition,” OpenAI argued.
The case, which was filed last December 2023, alleges that OpenAI has been abusing The New York Times’ copyright-protected articles in training their AI model ChatGPT.
The plaintiffs claim that this model may, at times, generate text excerpts or summaries of their articles without their authorization, thus devaluing their work as journalists.
OpenAI argues that publishing so many conversations between its users will breach privacy laws as well as the company’s obligation to ensure the security of the users’ data.
Dane Stuckey, the company’s Chief Information Security Officer, wrote in a blog post that the order would “force us to turn over tens of millions of highly personal conversations from people who have no connection to the Times’ baseless lawsuit.”
The company further highlighted that 99.99% of all the transcripts are irrelevant to the copyright claim, making the demand rather invasive.
However, the New York Times and other media plaintiffs claim that access to the logs is necessary so they can determine whether ChatGPT reproduced their copyrights, as well as to rebut OpenAI’s assertion that they “hacked” the chatbot to obtain evidence of copyright infringement.
Magistrate Judge Ona Wang, who signed the original order, stated that the privacy of users will be protected by “exhaustive de-identification” procedures and other safeguards. OpenAI has until Friday to comply or face potential sanctions.
The case represents one among several lawsuits facing top AI developers regarding the inclusion of copyrighted material in training datasets.
The decision will likely influence the manner in which courts treat the conflict between privacy, intellectual property, and artificial intelligence technological development.
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