OpenAI is challenging the New York Times’s efforts to access millions of private ChatGPT user conversations to support the newspaper’s lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company.
OpenAI said Wednesday it is taking “steps to comply” with the newspaper’s request “because we must follow the law.”
“The New York Times’ demand does not align with our privacy standards,” the tech company headed by Sam Altman added in a press release. “That is why we’re challenging it.”
OpenAI and the New York Times have been embroiled in legal fights since 2023. At the time, the newspaper brought a lawsuit against Altman’s company and Microsoft, OpenAI’s primary financial backer, due to copyright concerns centered on allegations that they unlawfully used millions of the outlet’s articles to help program ChatGPT and other AI models.
In the latest development in the New York court case this week, OpenAI said the outlet requested over 20 million ChatGPT user conversations randomly sampled from December 2022 to November 2024 as part of their “baseless lawsuit” to prove the tech company violated copyright laws.
“They claim they might find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall,” OpenAI wrote in a lengthy statement.
“We respect strong, independent journalism. … However, this demand from the New York Times does not live up to that legacy, and we’re asking the court to reject it,” the statement continues. “We strongly believe this is an overreach. It risks your privacy without actually helping resolve the lawsuit.”
One aspect of the copyright infringement case has involved the New York Times pushing Magistrate Judge Ona Wang to require ChatGPT to preserve all conversations to save possible evidence that the AI model is unlawfully using the newspaper’s data.
Wang ruled in May that OpenAI must preserve all future ChatGPT conversations, including those already being deleted by the company under standard default retention and deletion policies and those being deleted by users that are automatically removed from the system within 30 days.
Last month, Wang scaled back the ruling in response to challenges from OpenAI. The tech company can return to standard deletion policies under the latest order, but must preserve ChatGPT logs already saved under the previous order, the judge said.
OpenAI has not denied using data from the New York Times to train ChatGPT and other large language models. But Altman and Microsoft have argued the use is protected under a legal doctrine known as “fair use,” which allows for material to be reused without permission in certain instances, including for research, teaching, and commentary.
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“With fair use, you say, ‘Yes, there was infringement, but we’re not liable for it,’” Harvard Law School professor Mason Kortz explained.
“The way fair use is determined is through a four-factor test,” he continued. “The first factor is the character of the use, whether the allegedly infringing work is transformative or is merely duplicative of the original work. The second factor is the character of the original work. Works that are highly creative, that can contain a lot of expression, it’s harder to claim fair use. The third factor is the amount used. Did the alleged infringer use the entire protected work or only a small segment of it? And the fourth factor is what impact the allegedly infringing use has on the market for the original. Is this going to displace the market for the original, or is this entering a new market that the original copyright owner is not able to enter?”
