OpenAI accidentally deletes potential evidence crucial to its copyright lawsuit with the NY Times

The New York Times Company counsel wrote a letter to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on November 20, revealing that OpenAI engineers had deleted potential evidence in the copyright infringement lawsuit. The letter also described the attorneys’ inspection of the data on the 2 virtual machines provided by OpenAI.

The media company’s counsel said that The New York Times and Daily News, described as the News Plaintiffs in the letter, had spent 150 person-hours since November 1 reviewing the AI company’s training data for OpenAI chatbots. The attorneys confirmed that they had stored all their findings on the 2 virtual machines.

However, OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted all the News Plaintiffs’ search result data and programs stored on one virtual machine. The News Plaintiffs also outlined that OpenAI had confirmed the data erasure in a meeting held on November 15.

The attorneys mentioned that the AI company had tried to recover most of the data lost. The News Plaintiffs also said that the recovered files did not include the original folder names and file structure as saved before the data loss. On November 19, the plaintiffs further confirmed that the recovered data was not usable to build the OpenAI training models. 

The New York Times attorneys said that they had consulted with the ChatGPT parent company before filing the status letter with the New York court. However, OpenAI allegedly declined the offer to jointly file the letter. 

OpenAI demands NY Times proves AI is hurting news businesses

A report from Bloomberg Law revealed that OpenAI and Microsoft demanded that the NY Times prove that artificial intelligence was damaging to the news business. The newspaper allegedly mentioned that AI reduced subscriptions, advertising, affiliate, and licensing revenue for news companies. 

OpenAI and Microsoft filed separate letters to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, opening the motion. The two companies demanded that the New York Times test the “assertion of harm” instead of simply claiming that it suffered revenue loss because of the AI company. 

The letters come after the news publisher filed the status report with the district court during the ongoing dispute involving Microsoft, OpenAI, The NY Times, and Daily News. The news publisher filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the ChatGPT creator and Microsoft in December last year. 

Other news agencies sue OpenAI for copyright infringement

🚨 BREAKING: Indian news agency ANI sues OpenAI over copyright infringement in New Delhi. As AI copyright lawsuits PILE UP, this case hints at OpenAI's legal strategy and what might come next. Read this:

➡️ The arguments:

➤ The 1st hearing in this case took place in the New… pic.twitter.com/bKsuhCIa4P

— Luiza Jarovsky (@LuizaJarovsky) November 20, 2024

ANI, an Indian news agency, is the latest news publisher to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement. ANI filed the lawsuit with a New Dehli court, mentioning that the ChatGPT parent company had been using some of its published content to train its AI chatbot. The news agency further accused OpenAI of attributing fabricated stories to ANI, as stated in the letter filed. 

However, the ChatGPT developer has made it clear that it has stopped using news publishers’ content to train its AI. The court filing notably included emails from the AI company to the news agency, stating that ANI had been put on an internal block list. As such, the training models would not use published articles from news agencies in the future. 

According to a Reuters update, the New Dehli court issued a directive for OpenAI to provide a detailed response to ANI’s accusations in a Tuesday hearing. OpenAI has since confirmed that it uses publicly available information for its training models, also ensuring a fair utilization of the information. The AI company has also denied any allegations of copyright infringement from several news publishing companies, including the NY Times, Daily News, and Chicago Tribune.

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