OpenAI opposes a court order requiring it to retain user data in a lawsuit by The New York Times.

Gate News bot message, OpenAI is appealing a federal court order requiring it to retain all user data, including deleted chat logs, as part of a copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times.

OpenAI’s Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap stated in a statement: “We firmly believe that The New York Times’ actions are overreach. We will continue to appeal this order so that we can keep your trust and privacy as our top priority.”

The decision stems from an order dated May 13, which requires “to preserve and isolate all output log data (otherwise this data will be deleted) until further orders are issued by the court.”

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, accusing the two companies of illegally using The New York Times’ content to train large language models such as ChatGPT and Bing Chat.

The New York Times stated that this move infringes on its copyright and threatens the business model of original news. The newspaper mentioned last month that as users clear their chat history, potential evidence of copyright infringement may be deleted.

The core of this case is whether the use of copyrighted material to train generative artificial intelligence models constitutes “fair use.” The New York Times argues that OpenAI’s tools sometimes generate nearly verbatim outputs based on its articles and can bypass paywalls through AI-generated summaries.

Source: Decrypt