OpenAI says the New York Times hacked ChatGPT to create a copyright lawsuit
OpenAI has asked a federal judge to dismiss parts of the New York Times (NYT.N) copyright lawsuit against the newspaper, arguing that the newspaper “hacked” its chatbot ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence systems to create misleading evidence for generate the case.
OpenAI said in a filing in Manhattan federal court on Monday that the Times caused the technology to reproduce its material through “misleading prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use.”
“The allegations in the Times’ complaint do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards,” OpenAI said. “The truth, which will come to light as this case progresses, is that the Times paid someone to hack into OpenAI products.”
OpenAI did not name the “hired weapon” it said the Times used to manipulate its systems or accuse the newspaper of violating anti-hacking laws.
“What OpenAI is bizarrely mislabeling as ‘hacking’ is simply using OpenAI’s products to search for evidence that they stole and reproduced The Times’ copyrighted work,” the newspaper’s lawyer said, Ian Crosby, in a statement Tuesday.
OpenAI representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the filing.
The Times sued OpenAI and its biggest backer Microsoft in December, accusing them of using millions of its articles without permission to train chatbots to provide information to users.
The Times is one of several copyright owners who have sued tech companies for allegedly misusing their work in AI training, including groups of authors, visual artists and music publishers.
Technology companies have said their AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material and that the lawsuits threaten the growth of the potential multibillion-dollar industry.
Courts have not yet answered the key question of whether AI training qualifies as fair use under copyright law. So far, judges have dismissed some infringement claims over the output of generative AI systems based on a lack of evidence that AI-created content is similar to copyrighted works.
The New York Times complaint cited several instances in which OpenAI and Microsoft chatbots gave users near-verbatim excerpts of their articles when requested. It accused OpenAI and Microsoft of trying to “free ride on the Times’ massive investment in its journalism” and create a substitute for the newspaper.
OpenAI said in its filing that the Times took “tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results.”
“Normally, you can’t use ChatGPT to serve Times articles at will,” OpenAI said.
OpenAI’s filing also stated that it and other AI companies would ultimately win their case on the fair use question.
“The Times cannot prevent AI models from acquiring knowledge of facts, any more than any other news organization can prevent the Times itself from re-reporting stories that it had no role in investigating,” OpenAI said.