New York Times Says OpenAI ‘Hacking’ Claim is ‘Bizarre’

The lead counsel for The New York Times said Tuesday (Feb. 27) that OpenAI’s claims that the publisher “hacked” its artificial intelligence (AI) systems to produce misleading results “bizarrely mischaracterizes” the situation.

In an email to PYMNTS responding to a Reuters report, Ian Crosby, partner at Susman Godfrey and lead counsel for The New York Times, said that OpenAI’s court filing does not dispute that the company copied the publisher’s work without permission and used it to power its commercial products.

“What OpenAI bizarrely mischaracterizes as ‘hacking’ is simply using OpenAI’s products to look for evidence that they stole and reproduced The Times’s copyrighted works,” Crosby said in the email. “And that is exactly what we found. In fact, the scale of OpenAI’s copying is much larger than the 100-plus examples set forth in the complaint.”

Reuters reported Tuesday (Feb. 27) that OpenAI told a federal judge that The New York Times paid an expert to “hack” OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) systems to create misleading evidence for its copyright infringement lawsuit.

The AI firm said this while asking the judge to dismiss parts of that lawsuit, according to the report.

OpenAI said in a Monday (Feb. 26) court filing that The New York Times used deceptive prompts to cause OpenAI’s technology to reproduce the publisher’s copyrighted material, and violated the AI firm’s terms of service while doing so, per the report.

The firm also said in its Monday court filing that the “highly anomalous results” from its chatbots that copied articles from The New York Times when replying to users’ prompts were generated only after tens of thousands of attempts by The Times, according to the Reuters report. In normal use, those results would not appear, the filing said, per the report.

In the statement provided to PYMNTS, Crosby said that OpenAI regularly copies work without permission, conceals how its products operate, and confirmed that it knows that its unauthorized use of copyright work is not fair by entering into deals with other publishers.

“OpenAI’s response also shows that it is tracking users’ queries and outputs, which is particularly surprising given that they claimed not to do so,” Crosby said in the email. “We look forward to exploring that issue in discovery.”

The New York Times filed its copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in December, alleging that the tech companies used its content without permission to develop their AI products.

Reached by PYMNTS at the time, an OpenAI spokesperson said the firm respects the rights of content creators and owners and is “committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models.”