Not only does it appear that OpenAI has lost its fight to keep news organizations from digging through 20 million ChatGPT logs to find evidence of copyright infringement—but also OpenAI now faces calls for sanctions and demands to retrieve and share potentially millions of deleted chats long thought of as untouchable in the litigation.
On Monday, US District Judge Sidney Stein denied objections that OpenAI raised, claiming that Magistrate Judge Ona Wang failed to adequately balance privacy interests of ChatGPT users who are not involved in the litigation when ordering OpenAI to produce 20 million logs.
Instead, OpenAI wanted Stein to agree that it would be much less burdensome to users if OpenAI ran search terms to find potentially infringing outputs in the sample. That way, news plaintiffs would only get access to chats that were relevant to its case, OpenAI suggested.
But Stein found that Wang appropriately weighed ChatGPT users’ privacy interests when ordering OpenAI to produce the logs. For example, to shield ChatGPT users, the total number of logs shared was substantially reduced from tens of billions to 20 million, he wrote, and OpenAI has stripped all identifying information from any chats that will be shared.
Stein further agreed that news plaintiffs needed access to the entire sample because, as Wang wrote, even “output logs that do not contain reproductions of News Plaintiffs’ works may still be relevant to OpenAI’s fair use defense.”
Although OpenAI argued that Wang should have approved the “least burdensome” path to users’ privacy, the AI company cited no case-law to support that argument, Stein wrote, nor its claims that Wang owed them any explanation for rejecting that path.
“Judge Wang’s failure to explain explicitly why she rejected OpenAI’s search term proposal is not clearly erroneous or contrary to law given that she adequately explained her reasons for ordering production of the entirety of the 20 million de-identified log sample,” Stein wrote, affirming Wang’s order.