OpenAI Challenges Order for 20M ChatGPT Logs in NYT Suit

OpenAI has filed a motion in a New York federal court to overturn a judge's order requiring the company to produce 20 million anonymized ChatGPT conversation logs, arguing that the disclosure would violate user privacy in a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by The New York Times and other news outlets.

The filing, submitted on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, comes as OpenAI faces a Friday deadline to comply with the order issued by Magistrate Judge Ona Wang on November 7. The underlying lawsuit, filed in December 2023, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of unlawfully using the outlets' copyrighted articles to train ChatGPT, enabling the AI model to generate responses that reproduce protected content. The plaintiffs seek to examine the logs to identify instances where ChatGPT might have output their material, including potential efforts by users to bypass paywalls, and to counter OpenAI's claims that the outlets manipulated chatbot responses to create evidence.

OpenAI contends that the request is overly broad and irrelevant, noting that more than 99.99 percent of the logs bear no connection to the copyright allegations. "To be clear,...