The New York Times swung back at OpenAI, which had accused the newspaper of hiring someone to “hack” ChatGPT to generated the examples of regurgitation used for the complaint NYT filed against OpenAI.
The New York Times blasted OpenAI right from the get-go:
Lacking any real grounds for dismissal, OpenAI devotes much of its filing to grandstanding about issues on which it hasn’t moved. Its Motion introduces no fewer than 19 extrinsic documents, none of which can be properly considered on a motion to dismiss, in a submission that for nearly 10 pages reads more like spin than a legal brief.
Conspicuously, OpenAI’s attention-grabbing claim that The Times “hacked” its products (Mot. at 2) is as irrelevant as it is false. As Exhibit J to the Complaint makes clear, The Times elicited examples of memorization by prompting GPT-4 with the first few words or sentences of Times articles. That work was only necessary because OpenAI does not disclose the content it uses to train its models and power its user-facing products. Yet in OpenAI’s telling, The Times engaged in wrongdoing by detecting OpenAI’s theft of The Times’s own copyrighted content. OpenAI’s true grievance is not about how The Times conducted its investigation, but instead what that investigation exposed: that Defendants built their products by copying The Times’s content on an unprecedented scale—a fact that OpenAI does not, and cannot, dispute.
To download the NYT’s opposition, click below.