News organizations suing OpenAI have accused the company of misleading the court for two years by falsely claiming it could not search ChatGPT logs. The New York Times, leading the lawsuit, alleges OpenAI concealed its ability to search millions of logs, which could have been used to determine whether its chatbot technology violated copyright laws. According to the lawsuit, OpenAI allegedly misled the court about the technical feasibility of searching large anonymized samples of ChatGPT logs, even though it had already conducted such searches before litigation began. The court ordered a re-deposition of OpenAI’s privacy engineer, Vincent Monaco, which revealed that the company had hidden this fact from the court and the plaintiffs. 'Not once did OpenAI disclose the existence' of large samples of logs, the lawsuit said, despite the fact that these samples could have been made available to plaintiffs early on. 'OpenAI was willing and able to search its output logs—when it benefitted OpenAI,' the court filing stated, accusing the company of making the discovery process as burdensome as possible. The lawsuit argues that OpenAI’s actions obstructed access to evidence and distorted the discovery process to shield its fair use claims. 'For over two years, OpenAI lied to The Times, The Daily News Plaintiffs, the public, and the court,' the lawsuit said. 'It claimed searching ChatGPT outputs for copies of The Times’ and the Daily News Plaintiffs’ content was infeasible, burdensome, and invasive of users’ privacy—while at the same time concealing that it had already done such searches.' The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI forced plaintiffs to spend eight months searching in a 'sandbox,' where they could only access a heavily redacted sample of 20 million logs. This sample was much smaller than the 120 million news logs plaintiffs originally requested, allegedly narrowed due to OpenAI’s 'false representations regarding its existing technical capabilities' to search larger samples. 'This representation is belied by Mr. Monaco’s testimony that OpenAI already had the ability' to search 'large datasets, such as the more than 80 million output logs,' the court filing said. The 20 million log sample was further 'skewed' when OpenAI used AI to make 19 billion redactions to the sample—so many that the court found the sample 'unusable.' Eventually, OpenAI removed some of the redactions, but 'even then, a large number of redactions remain, including to News Plaintiffs’ domains, names, and other fields, which has hampered News Plaintiffs’ searches over the data,' the lawsuit alleged. Meanwhile, 'the entire time that OpenAI was engaging in the improper over-redaction of this sample, it had in its possession a sample of 78 million conversations that had already been de-identified,' the lawsuit said. 'OpenAI did not just oppose production of this evidence based on burden or relevance; it falsely represented to the Court that obtaining this evidence was beyond its capabilities without the expenditure of and months of work and that it would be just as easy for Plaintiffs to do this work—without disclosing that this work had already been done,' the plaintiffs alleged. Similarly frustrating were dragged-out meet-and-confers over data searches that plaintiffs claimed further limited discovery. For example, very close to discovery ending, OpenAI confusingly claimed that the 78 million log samples had been available for inspection for 'over a year,' the lawsuit alleged. However, 'this makes no sense,' the plaintiffs argued, considering OpenAI’s very public fight to supposedly defend ChatGPT user privacy by blocking access to any logs beyond the 20 million sample. 'Either OpenAI unintentionally produced the dataset and it was so hidden in the training inspection data that even OpenAI did not realize it, or OpenAI knew it buried the dataset in a previous production, but hid that fact from the Court and News Plaintiffs for nearly two years—all the while vigorously arguing that turning over these logs would violate user privacy,' the lawsuit said. Additionally, plaintiffs accused OpenAI of other misconduct to obstruct access to evidence. Although the exact amount is redacted, OpenAI randomly deleted some parts of that limited 20 million sample, they alleged. And that’s on top of allegedly deleting or compressing billions of logs that should have been preserved. According to NYT, OpenAI’s witness testified that OpenAI simply 'decided' that complying with the court’s sweeping preservation order to retain all chats 'would be hard; and thus took no steps to do so.' 'There can be no question as to the wilfulness of OpenAI’s conduct, nor any excuse for its non-compliance. According to Mr. Monaco, OpenAI thought about complying with the Court’s Preservation Order, but then decided not to,' the lawsuit alleged. 'Serious sanctions’ necessary News organizations claim that they do not request sanctions against OpenAI 'lightly' but that the 'severity' of OpenAI’s alleged misconduct requires sanctions to punish the AI firm and deter any other AI firms from following a similar playbook. Requesting 'severe' sanctions, news plaintiffs want the court to prohibit OpenAI from using the 20 million sample that it fought so hard for. They have further asked the court to find that
Source: arstechnica
