OpenAI must produce millions of anonymized chat logs from ChatGPT users in its high-stakes copyright dispute with the New York Times opens new tab and other news outlets, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang in a decision made public on Wednesday said, opens new tab that the 20 million logs were relevant to the outlets’ claims and that handing them over would not risk violating users’ privacy.
The judge rejected OpenAI’s privacy-related objections to an earlier order requiring the artificial intelligence startup to submit the records as evidence. “There are multiple layers of protection in this case precisely because of the highly sensitive and private nature of much of the discovery,” Wang said.
An OpenAI spokesperson on Wednesday cited an earlier blog post from the company’s Chief Information Security Officer Dane Stuckey, which said the Times’ demand for the chat logs “disregards long-standing privacy protections” and “breaks with common-sense security practices.”
OpenAI has separately appealed Wang’s order to the case’s presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein.
Spokespeople for the New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A group of newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group is also involved in the lawsuit. MediaNews Group executive editor Frank Pine said in a statement on Wednesday that OpenAI’s leadership was “hallucinating when they thought they could get away with withholding evidence about how their business model relies on stealing from hardworking journalists.”
The case, originally brought by the Times in 2023, is one of many brought by copyright owners against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms for using their material without permission to train their AI systems.
The news outlets argued in their case against OpenAI that the logs were necessary to determine whether ChatGPT reproduced their copyrighted content, and to rebut OpenAI’s assertion that they “hacked” the chatbot’s responses to manufacture evidence.
OpenAI countered that turning over the logs would disclose confidential user information and that “99.99%” of the transcripts have nothing to do with the infringement allegations.
Wang had said in her initial order to produce the chats that OpenAI users’ privacy would be protected by the company’s “exhaustive de-identification” and other safeguards. Wang reiterated on Wednesday that the company’s measures would “reasonably mitigate associated privacy concerns.”
REUTERS
