The technology company OpenAI – creator of the ChatGPT chatbot – asked a federal judge on Monday to dismiss parts of The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit, saying that the newspaper company ‘hacked’ its artificial intelligence to create misleading evidence for the case.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December, accusing them of infringing its copyright by using “millions of its articles” to train its AI.
OpenAI now accuses the outlet of paying a hacker to gain access to information about the case. However, the technology company did not accuse the newspaper of violating any laws against computer piracy.
“The allegations in the Times complaint do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards. The truth, which will come to light over the course of this case, is that the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI products,” he notes in the OpenAI legal document.
The technology company also indicates that it took the newspaper “tens of thousands of attempts” to demonstrate that the OpenAI technology in some cases reproduced excerpts from its articles almost word for word. “They were only able to do so by attacking and exploiting a bug (which OpenAI says it is committed to fixing) through the use of misleading prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use,” says the technology company.
In the text, OpenAI emphasizes that it has “important partnerships with news industry leaders,” ranging from giants like the Associated Press to smaller local media associated with the American Journalism Project.
Since ChatGPT became popular at the end of 2022, several writers and visual artists have denounced the company for not respecting their copyrights.
This month, actress Sarah Silverman and a group of authors saw a copyright infringement lawsuit they filed against OpenAI dismissed for failing to demonstrate similarity between the production made by ChatGPT and the books written by the plaintiffs.
