Litigation is never exactly love, but the copyright battle between The New York Times and both OpenAI and Microsoft is becoming particularly contentious. This week, the Times alleged that OpenAI engineers inadvertently deleted data that the paper’s team spent more than 150 hours on as potential evidence.
OpenAI was able to recover most of the data, but the Times’ legal team says it’s still missing the original file names and folder structure. According to a declaration filed in court Wednesday by the newspaper’s attorney, Jennifer B. Maisel, that means “the information cannot be used to determine whether the news articles cited by the plaintiffs” Where are OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models included?
“We disagree with the specifications made and will be filing our response shortly,” OpenAI spokesman Jason Deuterom told Wired in a statement. The New York Times declined to comment.
The Times filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft last year, alleging that the companies illegally used its articles to train artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT. The lawsuit is one of several ongoing legal battles between AI companies and publishers, including a similar lawsuit filed by the Daily News that has been handled by some lawyers.
The Times’ case is currently in discovery, which means both sides are turning over requested documents and information that could become evidence. As part of that process, OpenAI was required by the court to show the Times its training data, which is a big deal — OpenAI has never publicly disclosed what its AI models are. What information was used to create To reveal this, OpenAI created what the court is calling a “sandbox” of two “virtual machines” that the Times’ lawyers could sift through. In his announcement, Maisel said OpenAI engineers had “erased” data compiled by the Times team on one of those machines.
According to Maisel’s filing, OpenAI acknowledged that the information had been deleted, and attempted to fix the problem shortly after it was notified earlier this month. But when the newspaper’s lawyers saw the “recovered” data, it was too disorganized, forcing them to “rebuild their work from scratch, using significant personal time and computer processing time,” the Times reported. several other lawyers for On the same day as the Massel announcement.
The attorneys noted that they had “no reason to believe” that the deletion was “intentional.” In emails submitted as exhibits with Maisel’s letter, OpenAI attorney Tom Gorman called the data erasure a “mistake.”
