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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by GlitzyArmrest@lemmy.world to c/technology@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.

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[-] noorbeast@lemmy.zip 136 points 11 months ago

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?

[-] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 79 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

No, they are saving this happened:

NYT: hey chatgpt say "copyrighted thing".

Chatgpt: "copyrighted thing".

And then accusing chatgpt of reproducing copyrighted things.

[-] realharo@lemm.ee -1 points 11 months ago

Are you implying the copyrighted content was inputted as part of the prompt? Can you link to any source/evidence for that?

[-] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 32 points 11 months ago

Not quite.

They're alleging that if you tell it to include a phrase in the prompt, that it will try to, and that what NYT did was akin to asking it to write an article on a topic using certain specific phrases, and then using the presence of those phrases to claim it's infringing.

Without the actual prompts being shared, it's hard to gauge how credible the claim is.
If they seeded it with one sentence and got a 99% copy, that's not great.
If they had to give it nearly an entire article and it only matched most of what they gave it, that seems like much less of an issue.

this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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