In recent legal documents submitted by The New York Times regarding its lawsuit against OpenAI, it has been claimed that the AI company unintentionally erased crucial evidence. This evidence was gathered by the newspaper's legal team over a span of more than 150 hours.
Data Recovery Issues
The documents indicate that OpenAI was able to retrieve most of the data, however, the folder organization and file names were irretrievably lost. Consequently, the data that was recovered does not allow for an understanding of how the news articles from the plaintiffs were incorporated into the training sets for the AI model.
OpenAI's Response
Jason Deutrom, a representative from OpenAI, communicated to Wired that the company does not agree with the claims made in the lawsuit. He mentioned that they will be providing a formal response shortly. The New York Times initiated the lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in December of the previous year, claiming that the AI firm utilized its articles to enhance its AI models.
Accusations of Copyright Infringement
The lawsuit asserts that millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train automated chatbots, which now rival the news organization as a trusted source of information. It argues that both companies should be held liable for "billions of dollars" due to the "illegal copying and use of The Times' uniquely valuable works."
