New York Daily News and other outlets ask judge to reject OpenAI effort to keep deleting data

Lawyers for the Daily News The New York Times and other news outlets suing ChatGPT s parent company OpenAI have appealed a Manhattan judge to reject an effort by the equipment giant to continue deleting figures that could prove it stole journalists work Manhattan Federal Magistrate Judge Ona Wang last month ordered OpenAI to preserve its output logs and any related information slated for deletion after the news outlets accused the tech company of permanently dumping enormous swaths of details hindering their ability to prove AI products could circumvent paywalls to plagiarize and regurgitate copyrighted content OpenAI has solicited Wang to vacate the order arguing that continuing to store the evidence would be a massive burden and infringe on the privacy of users The news outlets say that the argument runs contrary to what OpenAI tells its users about being subject to retaining evidence if the law requires it They have noted that the AI companies don t deny the evidence deleted were pertinent to the lawsuit What it does not dispute is that the output log figures is relevant to the News Cases which as OpenAI has long recognized include infringement contends based on outputs generated by OpenAI s models and products lawyers wrote Tuesday Nor can it dispute that as a highly sophisticated instrument company that is at this moment valued at more than billion it has both the means and ability to preserve this concededly relevant content The news outlets say that OpenAI has used every trick in the book to skirt accountability In addition to the mass deletions they have accused the tech company of installing filters designed to make it harder to elicit answers containing journalists copyrighted works OpenAI s preferred program of action to protect its users input and privacy right away resuming mass deletions will also coincidentally allow it to continue to destroy statistics that would show its liability for copyright infringement lawyers for the news outlets wrote Addressing privacy concerns Wang s May order outlined that it was solely meant to preserve and segregate information that would not be provided wholesale to anyone or stored forever but used to address concerns raised in the suit If Wang is inclined to entertain the AI companies objection the newspapers explained she should give them a chance to analyze different populations of material and present findings to the court The suit alleges OpenAI has illegally harvested millions of news stories to train its large language models and build generative AI products that can vomit them out or versions of them to users That has sometimes resulted in journalists pirated reporting being misstated or misrepresented misinforming ChatGPT users the newspapers have argued While the newspapers publishers have spent billions of dollars to send real people to real places to overview on real events in the real world the two tech firms are purloining the papers reporting without compensation to create products that provide news and information plagiarized and stolen according to the lawsuit OpenAI has argued that the vast amount of content used to train its artificial intelligence bots is protected by fair use rules The doctrine applies to rules that allow specific to use copyrighted work for purposes like criticism commentary news reporting teaching and research However lawyers for the newspapers have argued that the fair use test involves transforming a copyrighted work into something new and the new work cannot compete with the original in the same marketplace The judge has rejected OpenAI s position that the newspapers haven t produced a shred of evidence that people are using ChatGPT or OpenAI s API products to get news instead of paying for it The newspapers noted Tuesday that engineers for the tech companies had all but admitted it themselves by acknowledging the chatbots weren t designed to slip past paywalls not that they couldn t They also cited another suit involving Google in which an OpenAI engineer acknowledged local news was a pretty common quer y among ChatGPT users The Times originally brought the Manhattan Federal Court suit in December The News along with other newspapers in affiliated companies MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing filed in April The other outlets included The Mercury News The Denver Post The Orange County Register and the St Paul Pioneer Press and Tribune Publishing s Chicago Tribune Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel Lawyers for OpenAI did not respond to The News requests for comment