OpenAI Battles Court Order to Hand Over 20 Million Private ChatGPT Conversations in NYT Copyright Case
4 Sources
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OpenAI fights order to hand over 20 million private ChatGPT...
There are very few things OpenAI has said or done over the last couple years that I agree with or am comfortable with, but there are exceptions to every rule and this is one of them. Sorry NYT, if I were a subscriber to that or other AI platform, you don't get to just rifle through all of my (and
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OpenAI fights order to hand over 20 million private ChatGPT conversations
OpenAI wants a court to reverse a ruling forcing the ChatGPT maker to give 20 million user chats to The New York Times and other news plaintiffs that sued it over alleged copyright infringement. Although OpenAI previously offered 20 million user chats as a counter to the NYT's demand for 120
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NYT lawsuit forces OpenAI to keep 20M ChatGPT chats
OpenAI argued that the order presents significant engineering challenges and conflicts with international data protection regulations like GDPR. OpenAI is engaged in a legal battle over a U.S. court order compelling it to indefinitely retain 20 million randomly sampled ChatGPT conversations as
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OpenAI fights order to turn over millions of ChatGPT conversations
OpenAI asked a New York judge to reverse an order to hand over 20 million anonymised ChatGPT logs in a copyright suit by the New York Times, arguing it would expose private user data and is irrelevant to the case. The Times says the logs are needed to assess potential misuse of its content. OpenAI
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OpenAI is fighting a federal court order requiring it to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT conversations to The New York Times in a copyright infringement lawsuit, arguing the disclosure would violate user privacy despite de-identification measures.
Legal Battle Over User Privacy
OpenAI is mounting a vigorous legal challenge against a federal court order requiring the company to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT conversations to The New York Times and other news outlets in an ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit
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. The AI company filed a motion on Wednesday asking US District Court for the Southern District of New York to reverse the November 7 ruling by Magistrate Judge Ona Wang, arguing that the disclosure would expose private user information despite de-identification measures4
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Source: ET
Scope and Scale of Data Disclosure
The disputed chat logs represent a random sampling of ChatGPT conversations spanning from December 2022 to November 2024, covering ChatGPT Free, Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers, as well as API customers without Zero Data Retention agreements
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. OpenAI emphasizes that these are complete conversations rather than individual prompt-output pairs, making them "much more likely to expose private information, in the same way that eavesdropping on an entire conversation reveals more private information than a 5-second conversation fragment"2
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Source: Ars Technica
Copyright Infringement Allegations
The New York Times filed the lawsuit in December 2023, alleging that OpenAI illegally used millions of its articles to train ChatGPT and other AI models
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. The news outlets argue that the chat logs are necessary to determine whether ChatGPT reproduced their copyrighted content and to counter OpenAI's assertion that they "hacked" the chatbot's responses to manufacture evidence4
. The lawsuit seeks the destruction of all models trained on NYT works and potentially billions in damages.Related Stories
Privacy and Precedent Concerns
OpenAI contends that "more than 99.99%" of the requested chats have no relevance to the copyright case and warns of setting a dangerous precedent for AI privacy
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. The company argues that courts don't allow plaintiffs suing Google to "dig through the private emails of tens of millions of Gmail users irrespective of their relevance," and the same principle should apply to AI tools2
.Data Retention and Security Measures
The preservation order, originally issued on May 13 and affirmed by District Judge Sidney Stein on June 26, conflicts with OpenAI's standard 30-day deletion policy for unsaved chats
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. OpenAI has implemented restricted access protocols, limiting access to a small legal and security team, and has committed that the data will not be used for training purposes. The company is also developing advanced security features, including client-side encryption for ChatGPT messages2
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