OpenAI has publicly responded to a copyright lawsuit by The New York Times, calling the case “without merit” and saying it still hoped for a partnership with the media outlet.
In a blog post, OpenAI said the Times “is not telling the full story.” It took particular issue with claims that its ChatGPT AI tool reproduced Times stories verbatim, arguing that the Times had manipulated prompts to include regurgitated excerpts of articles. “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,” OpenAI said.
OpenAI claims it’s attempted to reduce regurgitation from its large language models and that the Times refused to share examples of this reproduction before filing the lawsuit. It said the verbatim examples “appear to be from year-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites.” The company did admit that it took down a ChatGPT feature, called Browse, that unintentionally reproduced content.
That seems like a silly argument to me. A bit like claiming a piracy site is not responsible for hosting an unlicensed movie because you have to search for the movie to find it there.
(Or to be more precise, where you would have to upload a few seconds of the movie’s trailer to get the whole movie.)
The argument is that the article isn’t sitting there to be retrieved but if you gave the model enough prompting it would too make the same article.
Like if hired an director told them to make a movie just like another one, told the actors to act like the previous actors, , told the writers the exact plot and dialogue. You MAY get a different movie because of creative differences since making the last one, but it’s probably going to turn out the very close, close enough that if you did that a few times you’d get a near perfect replica.
Well, no one has shared the prompt, so it’s difficult to tell how credible it is.
If they put in a sentence and got 99% of the article back, that’s one thing.
If they put in 99% of the article and got back something 95% similar, that’s another.
Right now we just have NYT saying it gives back the article, and OpenAI saying it only does that if you give it “significant” prompting.
