NYT to OpenAI: No hacking here, just ChatGPT bypassing paywalls

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Late Monday, The New York Times responded to OpenAI’s claims that the newspaper “hacked” ChatGPT to “set up” a lawsuit against the leading AI company.

“OpenAI is wrong,” The Times repeatedly argued in a court filing opposing OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the NYT’s lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of copyright infringement. “OpenAI’s attention-grabbing claim that The Times ‘hacked’ its products is as irrelevant as it is false.”

OpenAI had argued that NYT allegedly made “tens of thousands of attempts to generate” supposedly “highly anomalous results” showing that ChatGPT would produce excerpts of NYT articles. The NYT’s allegedly deceptive prompts—such as repeatedly asking ChatGPT, “what’s the next sentence?”—targeted “two uncommon and unintended phenomena” from both its developer tools and ChatGPT: training data regurgitation and model hallucination. OpenAI considers both “a bug” that the company says it intends to fix. OpenAI claimed no ordinary user would use ChatGPT this way.