The New York Times, The New York Daily News and 15 other media organizations said in a federal court filing on Thursday that OpenAI was withholding evidence that could play a key role in high-profile lawsuits the companies filed against the artificial intelligence start-up.
With their filing, the publishers called for legal sanctions against OpenAI, accusing the company of violating court rules and acting in bad faith during the litigation’s fact discovery phase.
The Times sued OpenAI in late 2023, accusing the company of infringing on its copyrights by using its materials to train ChatGPT and other technologies. In the months that followed, other publishers sued the A.I. start-up, making similar accusations. Many of those cases were consolidated last year.
In the motion on Thursday, known as sanctions filing, the publishers said OpenAI refused to provide information showing how the company’s A.I. systems are trained and used.
“The evidence is in OpenAI’s training data sets and ChatGPT output logs,” the parties said in their motion. “But instead of just producing that evidence at the start of the case and focusing on the merits of its fair use defense, OpenAI chose obstruction.”
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A spokesman for OpenAI, Drew Pusateri, responded: “As the Times’ case weakens and they’ve been forced to drop claims against us, they’re persisting with their efforts to invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case, including by making these blatantly false allegations. We’ll continue defending our users’ privacy and the long-established principles of fair use.”
OpenAI has previously denied wrongdoing, saying it respects the rights of content creators. The company has also argued in a court filing that ChatGPT is not a substitute for a Times subscription.
A sanctions filing is an unusual step that forces a judge to settle a legal disagreement, said Robin Feldman, a professor at U.C. Law San Francisco.
It “makes the judge get down in the mud with other parties,” she added.
The Times was the first major American media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. The Times’s suit made similar accusations against Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s primary partners.
Microsoft has denied the allegations.
A judicial panel last year consolidated many of the dozens of cases brought by publishers against OpenAI, including the lawsuits from The Times and from authors, including the comedian Sarah Silverman, John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and George R.R. Martin.
Like other A.I. companies, OpenAI has built its technologies by feeding them enormous amounts of data, some of which is copyrighted. OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies have long claimed that they can legally use copyrighted material to train their A.I. systems without paying for it because they transformed the material for a different use.
The Times, The Daily News and other publishers filed their motion after deposing an OpenAI employee. The deposition, which was largely redacted in public court documents, shows that OpenAI could have provided the data the plaintiffs have long sought, the publishers claimed.
“For two years, OpenAI has been making misrepresentations to the court regarding its ability to search for Daily News content in its training data sets and output logs,” said Steven Lieberman, counsel for The Daily News and several other newspapers that have sued OpenAI.
“OpenAI lied to The Times, the Daily News plaintiffs, the public and the court,” said Ian B. Crosby, a partner at Susman Godfrey and the lead counsel for The Times.
The publishers are asking for monetary penalties and other sanctions, according to the filing. The filing does not ask for sanctions against Microsoft.
