Technology

59673 readers

2917 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

407

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 GlitzyArmrest@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

137 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

it can’t tell you about what’s going on in the present (except by doing a web search, which my understanding is not a part of this lawsuit)

It's absolutely part of the lawsuit. NYT just isn't emphasising it because they know OpenAI is perfectly within their rights to do web searches and bringing it up would weaken NYT's case.

ChatGPT with web search is really good at telling you what's on right now. It won't summarise NYT articles, because NYT has blocked it with robots.txt, but it will summarise other news organisations that cover the same facts.

The fundamental issue is news and facts are not protected by copyright... and organisations like the NYT take advantage of that all the time by immediately plagiarising and re-writing/publishing stories broken by thousands of other news organisations. This really is the pot calling the kettle black.

When NYT loses this case, and I think they probably will, there's a good chance OpenAI will stop checking robots.txt files.