OpenAI claims New York Times ‘intentionally manipulated’ ChatGPT

The news: OpenAI has said the New York Times “intentionally manipulated” its chatbot as it claimed the publisher's copyright lawsuit against the ChatGPT creator "is without merit."

The numbers: The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on 27 December, accusing the artificial intelligence firm of taking a "free ride" by using millions of articles to train data to power its chatbot technology. On Monday, OpenAI published a detailed response on its blog, claiming the newspaper was not "telling the full story".

The context: The lawsuit, which is seeking billions of dollars in damages, claims that OpenAI has profited from the “exploitation and misappropriation of The Times’s intellectual property”. While the newspaper is not the first to allege copyright infringement against OpenAI, many copyright lawyers view this lawsuit as the best chance to establish rules for the technology.

What they said: “It seems [the Times] intentionally manipulated prompts, often including lengthy excerpts of articles, in order to get our model to regurgitate,” the OpenAI statement said. “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."