OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in New York Times copyright lawsuit case [Video]

OpenAI may have accidentally deleted important data related to its ongoing copyright lawsuit brought by the New York Times.

First reported by TechCrunch, counsel for the Times and its co-plaintiff Daily News sent a letter to the judge overseeing the case, detailing how “an entire week’s worth of its experts’ and lawyers’ work” was “irretrievably lost.” OpenAI had provided the plaintiffs with two dedicated virtual machines for researching alleged instances of copyright infringement. According to the letter, on Nov. 14, “programs and search result data stored on one of the dedicated virtual machines was erased by OpenAI engineers.”

The Times has accused OpenAI, and Microsoft which uses OpenAI’s models for its Bing AI chatbot, of copyright infringement by training its models on paywalled and unauthorized content. The lawsuit detailed multiple instances of “near-verbatim” copy in ChatGPT responses. OpenAI has refuted this claim, saying their models were trained on publicly available data, and therefore fair …