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.
Fortunately copyright depends on publication, so the text simply pre-existing somewhere won’t ruin everything.
Unless you don’t like copyright, in which case it’s “unfortunately.”
That is not correct. Copyright subsists in all original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102
Legally, when you write your shopping list, you instantly have the rights to that work, no publication or registration necessary. You can choose to publish it later, or not at all, but you still own the rights. Someone can’t break into your house, look at your unpublished works, copy them, and publish them like they’re their originals.