At the end of last year, OpenAI and Microsoft were accusedWithout permissionThe New York Times filed a statement in court earlier this month after improperly using the content of its millions of articles to train its chatbot service.displayOpenAI’s internal engineers once “accidentally” deleted the artificial intelligence training data that the New York Times team spent more than 150 hours researching and organizing. Although some of the data was later restored, the original file names and folder structures that showed when OpenAI copied the training content into the artificial intelligence model were cleverly “lost”.
Jennifer B. Maisel, a New York Times attorney, told the court that OpenAI acknowledged the deletion of the data but emphasized that it had been restored shortly thereafter. Maisel said the New York Times had to spend considerable time reorganizing the restored data, only to discover that some information, including the original file names and folder structure, had not been restored.
In an email submitted to the court as evidence, OpenAI consultant Tom Gorman described the loss of relevant data as an "abnormal malfunction," but Jennifer B. Maisel is more inclined to believe that this was an intentional act.
However, OpenAI spokesman Jason Deutrom said that the New York Times' allegations were not true and that he would make relevant clarifications.
When the New York Times filed its lawsuit last year, it alleged that OpenAI and Microsoft intended to use New York Times content for free to train artificial intelligence and provide it as a service to the public, thus infringing upon the copyright of the content. Later, while compiling supporting evidence, the New York Times alleged that OpenAI's service experienced severe and recurring technical issues, making it impossible to effectively search for relevant training data, thereby clarifying the scope of OpenAI's alleged infringement.
While the lawsuit between the New York Times and OpenAI is still ongoing, OpenAI has reached licensing agreements with several publishers, including The Atlantic, Axel Springer, Vox Media, and Condé Nast, the parent company of WIRED magazine. Market expectations are that the outcome of the lawsuit between the New York Times and OpenAI will serve as an important reference for the future development of artificial intelligence products.
