Judge forces OpenAI to produce 20 million chat logs in copyright lawsuit — CEO Sam Altman's "fair use" defense relies on this

Over the past few years, OpenAI has faced multiple copyright infringement lawsuits, with news outlets and publishers claiming ChatGPT used their content without authorization or compensation.

Probably the most prominent case to date is the New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The news outlet claimed that ChatGPT used its content without compensation or authorization.

However, OpenAI has sought to dismiss the lawsuit by arguing that scraping online content to train AI models qualifies as fair use. Until recently, OpenAI has had the last laugh in court. In 2024, a New York federal judge recently dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against OpenAI by news outlets, including Raw Story and AlterNet.

The judge indicated that the plaintiffs didn't establish where the AI firm sourced its content, and that it potentially then used the scraped data to train ChatGPT without compensation.

OpenAI was recently compelled to produce 20 million chat logs from ChatGPT users in its ongoing court battle with the New York Times, in a case before U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang in Manhattan (via Reuters).

While OpenAI previously argued that this was a huge ask that would "disregard long-standing privacy protections," the judge indicated that the logs were important to establish the outlets' claims. Wang further indicated that producing the logs wouldn't violate ChatGPT users' privacy. "There are multiple layers of protection in this case precisely because of the highly sensitive and private nature of much of the discovery," the judge added.

OpenAI has already filed an appeal to wiggle its way out of Wang's order to produce 20 million chat logs to the presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein.

In the past, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that copyright law doesn't categorically prohibit the use of copyrighted content for training AI models. Interestingly, the executive admitted that developing ChatGPT-like tools without copyrighted content is virtually impossible.

MediaNews Group executive editor Frank Pine indicated that OpenAI's leadership was "hallucinating when they thought they could get away with withholding evidence about how their business model relies on stealing from hardworking journalists."

It'll be interesting to see how the court case pans out, especially following recent reports suggesting that top AI labs might be unable to advance AI models due to a lack of high-quality training content amid plans to inject ads into ChatGPT.

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