The New York Times says OpenAI deleted evidence in its copyright lawsuit

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking told Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver a chilling but memorable hypothetical story a decade ago about the potential dangers of AI. The gist is a group of scientists build a superintelligent computer and ask it, “Is there a God?” The computer answers, “There is now” and a bolt of lightning zaps the plug preventing it from being shut down. Let’s hope that’s not what happened with OpenAI and some missing evidence from the New York Times’ plagiarism lawsuit.

Wired reported that a court declaration filed by the New York Times on Wednesday says that OpenAI’s engineers accidentally erased evidence of the AI’s training data that took a long time to research and compile. OpenAI recovered some of the data but “the original file names and folder structure” that show when the AI copied its articles into its models are still missing.

OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom disagreed with the NYT’s claims and says the company “will file our response soon.” The Times has been battling Microsoft and OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement with its AI models since December of last year.

The lawsuit is still in its discovery phase when evidence is requested and delivered by both sides to build its case for trial. OpenAI had to turn over its training data to the Times but hasn’t publicly revealed the exact information it used to build the AI modes.

Instead, OpenAI created a “sandbox” of two virtual machines so the NYT’s legal team could conduct its research. The NYT’s legal team spent more than 150 hours sifting through the data on one of the machines before the data was deleted. OpenAI acknowledged the deletion but the company’s legal team called it a “glitch.” Although OpenAI engineers tried to correct the mistake, the restored data was missing the NYT’s work. This led the NYT to essentially recreate everything from scratch. The NYT’s lawyers said they had no reason to believe the deletion was intentional.