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.
I haven’t really picked a side, mostly because there’s just not enough evidence. NYT hasn’t provided any of the prompts they used to prove their claim. The OpenAI blog post seems to make suggestions about what happened, but they’re obviously biased.
If the model spits out an original article by just providing a single paragraph, then the NYT has a case. If like OpenAI says that part of the prompt were lengthy excerpt, and the model just continued with the same style and format, then I don’t think they have a case.