OpenAI is facing fresh legal pressure after a coalition of newspaper publishers accused the company of misleading a US federal court in its ongoing copyright battle. The publishers have accused the tech giant of gross misconduct. The allegations were made during the discovery process in the lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company and New York Daily News LLC.
The latest filing shifts the focus beyond copyright infringement. It questions whether OpenAI accurately represented its technical capabilities and complied with its obligation to preserve evidence relevant to the lawsuit.
Earlier, OpenAI said that it was unable to search its AI systems to determine whether any copyrighted material from news articles had been included in its training data or in ChatGPT outputs.
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri rejected the allegations. He said, “As the Times’ case weakens and they’ve been forced to drop claims against us, they’re persisting with their efforts to invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case, including by making these blatantly false allegations.”
Additionally, the publishers claim that the company deleted billions of ChatGPT conversation records or made them inaccessible for review. These records may help determine if ChatGPT used copyrighted journalism or content from protected news sources in its answers.
According to the publishers, the alleged data loss has made it more difficult to collect evidence.
According to OpenAI, the allegations are untrue and misleading. The company has stated that providing broad access to ChatGPT discussions will harm user privacy. OpenAI also maintains that it has complied with all applicable legal requirements during the trial.
The firm still defends its position on applying the fair use principle when training large language models on openly available information. This is one of the key points of many lawsuits concerning generative AI firms.
The copyright case, filed back in 2023, has become one of the landmark cases concerning generative AI. The results of this lawsuit may affect how AI firms manage user data, handle evidence in trials, and use copyrighted materials for model training.
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