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OpenAI claims The New York Times tricked ChatGPT into copying its articles (www.theverge.com)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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OpenAI has publicly responded to a copyright lawsuit by The New York Times, calling the case “without merit” and saying it still hoped for a partnership with the media outlet.

In a blog post, OpenAI said the Times “is not telling the full story.” It took particular issue with claims that its ChatGPT AI tool reproduced Times stories verbatim, arguing that the Times had manipulated prompts to include regurgitated excerpts of articles. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said.

OpenAI claims it’s attempted to reduce regurgitation from its large language models and that the Times refused to share examples of this reproduction before filing the lawsuit. It said the verbatim examples “appear to be from year-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites.” The company did admit that it took down a ChatGPT feature, called Browse, that unintentionally reproduced content.

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[–] [email protected] 95 points 10 months ago (50 children)

The problem is not that it's regurgitating. The problem is that it was trained on NYT articles and other data in violation of copyright law. Regurgitation is just evidence of that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Only publishing it is a copyright issue. You can also obtain copyrighted material with a web browser. The onus is on the person who publishes any material they put together, regardless of source. OpenAI is not responsible for publishing just because their tool was used to obtain the material.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There are issues other than publishing, but that's the biggest one. But they are not acting merely as a conduit for the work, they are ingesting it and deriving new work from it. The use of the copyrighted work is integral to their product, which makes it a big deal.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, the ingestion part is still to be determined legally, but I think OpenAI will be ok. NYT produces content to be read, and copyright only protects them from people republishing their content. People also ingest their content and can make derivative works without problem. OpenAI are just doing the same, but at a level of ability that could be disruptive to some companies. This isn't even really very harmful to the NYT, since the historical material used doesn't even conflict with their primary purpose of producing new news. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

copyright only protects them from people republishing their content

This is not correct. Copyright protects reproduction, derivation, distribution, performance, and display of a work.

People also ingest their content and can make derivative works without problem. OpenAI are just doing the same, but at a level of ability that could be disruptive to some companies.

Yes, you can legally make derivative works, but without license, it has to be fair use. In this case, where not only did they use one whole work in its entirety, they likely scraped thousands of whole NYT articles.

This isn’t even really very harmful to the NYT, since the historical material used doesn’t even conflict with their primary purpose of producing new news.

This isn't necessarily correct either. I assume they sell access to their archives, for research or whatever. Being able to retrieve articles verbatim through chatgpt does harm their business.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yes, you can legally make derivative works, but without license, it has to be fair use. In this case, where not only did they use one whole work in its entirety, they likely scraped thousands of whole NYT articles.

Scraping is the same as reading, not reproducing. That isn't a copyright violation.

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