OpenAI has asked a federal judge in New York to overturn an order that requires it to hand over 20 million anonymised ChatGPT chat logs in connection with an ongoing copyright lawsuit filed by several news outlets. The company argued that the move would compromise users’ privacy and reveal confidential information.
In its court filing, OpenAI said that “99.99%” of the requested chat logs have no connection to the copyright infringement claims made in the case. It added, “To be clear: anyone in the world who has used ChatGPT in the past three years must now face the possibility that their personal conversations will be handed over to The Times to sift through at will in a speculative fishing expedition.”
The news organisations behind the lawsuit claim that OpenAI used their copyrighted material to train ChatGPT, allowing the system to reproduce parts of their content in its responses. They said that accessing the chat logs is necessary to verify whether their work was used in this way and to counter OpenAI’s claim that they “hacked” the chatbot to create evidence.
Magistrate Judge Ona Wang had earlier ruled that OpenAI must produce the chat logs, stating that users’ privacy would remain protected through “exhaustive de-identification” measures and other safeguards. The company has until Friday to comply with the order.
Dane Stuckey, OpenAI’s Chief Information Security Officer, said in a blog post that sharing the data would “force us to turn over tens of millions of highly personal conversations from people who have no connection to the Times’ baseless lawsuit.” He said this would violate the company’s privacy and security commitments to its users.
In response, a spokesperson for the news outlets said OpenAI’s statement “purposely misleads its users and omits the facts.” The spokesperson added, “No ChatGPT user’s privacy is at risk. The court ordered OpenAI to provide a sample of chats, anonymised by OpenAI itself, under a legal protective order.”
The case is one of several ongoing lawsuits against artificial intelligence companies accused of using copyrighted materials to train their models without proper permission.
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