OpenAI Defends Use Of Copyrighted Content Following New York Times Infringement Lawsuit

Ted Johnson

8 January 2024 at 3:31 pm·2-min read

OpenAI claims The New York Times “intentionally manipulated prompts” to provide examples of where ChatGPT mimicked Gray Lady content.

OpenAI’s comments came in a blog post response to the Times’ copyright infringement lawsuit against the company. Times claims that OpenAI seeks “to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.”

More from Deadline

In the blog post, OpenAI argued that the use of copyrighted content for AI training models was fair use, but that they have still offered an “opt-out process” to prevent their tools from accessing their sites.

“Training AI models using publicly available internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents,” he wrote. “We view this principle as fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and critical for US competitiveness.”

OpenAI also argued that ChatGPT’s “regurgitation” of content was “a rare bug.”

“Because models learn from the enormous aggregate of human knowledge, any one sector—including news—is a tiny slice of overall training data, and any single data source—including The New York Times—is not significant for the model’s intended learning,” the company said.

It added, “Interestingly, the regurgitations The New York Times induced appear to be from years-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites. It seems they intentionally manipulated prompts, often including lengthy excerpts of articles, in order to get our model to regurgitate. 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.”

The Times’ lawsuit, filed late last month, is the first time a major media organization has sued an AI platform. Other IP owners including Sarah Silverman, John Grisham and Getty Images also have pursued litigation.

Ian Crosby, partner with Susman Godfrey and lead counsel for The New York Times, said in a statement, “The blog concedes that OpenAI used The Times’s work, along with the work of many others, to build ChatGPT. As The Times’s complaint states, ‘Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as ‘Copilot’) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.’ That’s not fair use by any measure.”

Best of Deadline