OpenAI claims The New York Times tricked ChatGPT into copying its articles

https://lemmy.world/post/10470246

OpenAI claims The New York Times tricked ChatGPT into copying its articles - Lemmy.World

> 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. > However, the company maintained its long-standing position that in order for AI models to learn and solve new problems, they need access to “the enormous aggregate of human knowledge.” It reiterated that while it respects the legal right to own copyrighted works — and has offered opt-outs to training data inclusion — it believes training AI models with data from the internet falls under fair use rules that allow for repurposing copyrighted works. The company announced website owners could start blocking its web crawlers from accessing their data on August 2023, nearly a year after it launched ChatGPT. > The company recently made a similar argument to the UK House of Lords, claiming no AI system like ChatGPT can be built without access to copyrighted content. It said AI tools have to incorporate copyrighted works to “represent the full diversity and breadth of human intelligence and experience.” > But OpenAI said it still hopes it can continue negotiations with the Times for a partnership similar to the ones it inked with Axel Springer and The Associated Press. “We are hopeful for a constructive partnership with The New York Times and respect its long history,” the company said.

So, OpenAI is admitting its models are open to manipulation by anyone and such manipulation can result in near verbatim regurgitation of copyright works, have I understood correctly?

No, they are saving this happened:
NYT: hey chatgpt say “copyrighted thing”. Chatgpt: “copywrited thing”.

Sand then accusing chatgpt of reproducing copyrighted things.

Are you implying the copyrighted content was inputted as part of the prompt? Can you link to any source/evidence for that?
That’s what OpenAI insinuates in their post; openai.com/blog/openai-and-journalism
OpenAI and journalism

We support journalism, partner with news organizations, and believe The New York Times lawsuit is without merit.

If the point is to prove that the model contains an encoded version of the original article, and you make the model spit out the entire thing by giving it the first paragraph or two, I don’t see anything wrong with such a proof.

I haven’t really picked a side, mostly because there’s just not enough evidence. NYT hasn’t provided any of the prompts they used to prove their claim. The OpenAI blog post seems to make suggestions about what happened, but they’re obviously biased.

If the model spits out an original article by just providing a single paragraph, then the NYT has a case. If like OpenAI says that part of the prompt were lengthy excerpt, and the model just continued with the same style and format, then I don’t think they have a case.