The 27th of February (Reuters) – OpenAI has filed a petition with a federal judge to have some portions of the copyright lawsuit that the New York Times (NYT.N) has filed against it dismissed. OpenAI contends that the newspaper “hacked” its chatbot ChatGPT and other artificial-intelligence systems in order to provide evidence that is deceptive for the case.
In a document that was submitted to the federal court in Manhattan on Monday, OpenAI stated that the Times was responsible for the technology reproducing its content by using “deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use.”
“The allegations in the Times’s complaint do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards,” an OpenAI spokesperson stated. “The truth, which will come out in the course of this case, is that the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products.”
OpenAI did not identify the “hired gun” that it said the Times employed in order to control its systems, nor did it accuse the newspaper of violating any laws and regulations that prohibit hacking.
The attorney for The Times, Ian Crosby, issued a statement on Tuesday in which he stated that “what OpenAI bizarrely mischaracterizes as ‘hacking’ is simply using OpenAI’s products to look for evidence that they stole and reproduced The Times’ copyrighted work.”
After receiving a request for comment on the file, representatives from OpenAI did not immediately react to the request.
In December, The Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft (MSFT.O), which is its main financial sponsor, accusing them of utilizing millions of its stories without permission in order to train chatbots to deliver information to consumers.
There are a number of copyright owners, including groups of authors, visual artists, and music publishers, who have filed lawsuits against technology corporations for allegedly misusing their work in artificial intelligence training. The Times is one of these rights owners.
Tech corporations have stated that their artificial intelligence systems make appropriate use of copyrighted content, and that the lawsuits pose a threat to the expansion of the industry, which has the potential to be worth several trillions of dollars.
When it comes to copyright law, the most important question that has not yet been answered by the courts is whether or not AI training is considered fair use. The absence of evidence that content created by AI is similar to works that are protected by intellectual property rights has led to the dismissal of several infringement claims regarding the output of generative artificial intelligence systems.
In its complaint, the New York Times identified multiple instances in which chatbots developed by OpenAI and Microsoft provided users with nearly verbatim snippets of the newspaper’s articles when they were encouraged to do so. It made the accusation that OpenAI and Microsoft were attempting to “free-ride on the massive investment that the Times has made in its journalism” and develop an alternative to the newspaper medium.
It required “tens of thousands of attempts” to achieve the very unusual results, according to OpenAI, which stated this in its submission with the relevant authorities.
“In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will,” according to OpenAI.
In addition, OpenAI stated in its brief that it and other artificial intelligence companies would eventually prevail in their challenges based on the fair-use question.
“The Times cannot prevent AI models from acquiring knowledge about facts, any more than another news organization can prevent the Times itself from re-reporting stories it had no role in investigating,” a spokesperson for OpenAI.