OpenAI appealed to a federal judge in New York on Wednesday (12) to overturn a decision requiring the startup to hand over more than 20 million anonymous records of conversations with ChatGPT amid a copyright infringement suit brought by The New York Times and other media outlets. The argument is that this would expose users’ private interactions.
The AI company claimed that handing over the logs would expose users’ confidential information and that “99.99%” of the texts were unrelated to the allegations in the case.
“To be clear: Anyone in the world who has used ChatGPT in the past three years must now face the prospect of their personal conversations being turned over to The Times for examination at will by a speculative investigation,” the startup said in a lawsuit.
The media argued that the logs were needed to determine whether ChatGPT had reproduced copyrighted content and to refute OpenAI’s claim that they had “hacked” the chatbot’s responses to fabricate evidence.
The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI improperly used protected content to train ChatGPT to respond to user requests.
In her ruling, Judge Eona Wang said that users’ privacy would be protected by the company’s “comprehensive anonymity” and other safeguards. OpenAI has a deadline of Friday (14) to produce texts.
Dane Stuckey, OpenAI’s chief information security officer, said in a post on the company’s blog on Wednesday that sharing the logs would violate privacy and security measures and “would force us to hand over tens of millions of personal conversations from people who have no connection to the Times’s baseless lawsuit.”
A spokesperson told The New York Times that the OpenAI blog post “intentionally misleads its users and misses the facts.”
“The privacy of any ChatGPT user is not at risk,” the spokesperson said. “The court ordered OpenAI to provide a sample of the chats, anonymized by OpenAI itself, under a legal protection order.”
The OpenAI case is one of several lawsuits pending against technology companies over alleged misuse of copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence systems.
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