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OpenAI claims The New York Times tricked ChatGPT into copying its articles (www.theverge.com)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] SheeEttin 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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 Someone can't break into your house, look at your unpublished works, copy them, and publish them like they're their originals.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

No, a list of facts like a shopping list is not under copyright protection.

If you wrote the list as a poem, you could claim it, though.

[–] SheeEttin 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Right, but it's not a pure list of facts. When you set it to paper, it's unique, and you could argue it's art. In fact, a quick Google search found one such example: https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Shopping-list-1/2146403/10186433/view

Granted, that one was presumably intended to be a work of art on creation and your weekly shopping list isn't, but the intent during creation isn't all that important for US copyright law. You create it, you get the rights.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Here's the ruling.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright. In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.

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