1. There is little doubt that OpenAI has NYT articles in it's dataset.
2. They claim it's OK because all of the IP is mixed together and effectively laundered.
3. But in fact if you put in a secret code you can get the IP back nearly verbatim.
4. So if OpenAI wins this case we could just trade prompts that regurgitate the articles back without ever visiting NYT.
This seems like the inverse of the old "book cipher" scheme to "avoid" copyright infringement.
If you want to distribute something you're not allowed to, first you find some public data (e.g. a public domain book), then you xor it against the thing you want to distribute. The result is gibberish. Then you distribute the gibberish and the name of the book to use as a key and anyone can use them to recover the original. The "theory" is that neither the gibberish nor the public domain book can be used to recover the original work alone, so neither is infringing by itself, and any given party is only distributing one of them. Obviously this doesn't work and the person distributing the gibberish rather than the public domain book is going to end up in court.
So then which side of the fence is ChatGPT and which side is the text you have to feed it to get it to emit the article? Well, it's the latter that you need access to both the existing ChatGPT and the original article in order to produce.
Notice also that this fails in the same way. The people distributing the text that can be combined with the LLM to reproduce the article are the ones with the clear intention to infringe the copyright. Moreover, you can't produce the prompt that would get ChatGPT to do that unless you already have access to the article, so people without a subscription can't use ChatGPT that way. And, rather importantly, the scheme is completely vacuous. If you already have access to the article needed to generate the relevant prompt and you want to distribute it to someone else, you don't have to give them some prompt they can feed to ChatGPT, you can just give them the text of the article.
Corporation vs individual is a distraction. It’s some people (wrongly, in my view) prioritising production over consumption. If this were Altman personally producing an AI, the same people would rally to him.
The corporate/individual framing needlessly inflames the debate when it’s really one about power and money.
We're not debating whether they do. "Humans that write news articles" are producing. That contrasts with "an individual mak[ing] a single copy of a song and giv[ing] it to a friend." We don't put journalists in jail for plagiarism.
I'm guessing you're imagining a scenario here were a journalist has copied an entire article verbatim and republished it in their newspaper. That would actually be both copyright infringement AND plagiarism. Newspapers just rarely enforce that right.
These two things aren't on a scale. They are independent infractions.
OpenAI is "stealing other people's [sic] actual work." The people rallying to it clearly don't care that much about it now. They wouldn't care whether it's a corporation or Sam Altman per se doing it.
ChatGPT is somewhere in-between - You can't just ask it for a specific NYT article and have it spit it back at you verbatim (NYT acknowledges as such, it took them ~10k prompts to do it), but with enough hints and guesses you can coax it into producing one (along with pretty much anything else you want). The question then becomes whether that's closer to the Pi example (ChatGPT is basically just spitting the prompt back at you), or if it's easy enough to do that it similar to ChatGPT just hosting the article.
Edit: I suppose I'd add, this is also a separate question from the training, training on copyrighted material may or may not be legal regardless of whether the model can verbatim spit the training material back out.
The law doesn't not care about your weird edge cases. What matters is what should be and how we can make it so.
PI is not copyrighted, because that would be silly, but if you were to find the exact bytes in there to reproduce the next Marvel movie and you started sharing that offset, that would probably be copyright infringement. The fact that neither of those numbers were part of the original work, or copyrightable in isolation, or that "technically everything is present in pi", is immaterial. It's obvious to any non-pedantic human being that you're infringing on the creative work.
If I give you a prompt that's just the contents of a NYT article and me telling ChatGPT to say it back to me, is ChatGPT committing the copyright violation by producing the article or am I by creating and sharing the prompt?
There is no reasonable way for us to deliberate on your made up scenarios, because in matters of law the details matter. The website hosting pi could very well be taking part in the copyright infringement, it could also very well not. Our way of weighing those details is the process of the law.
You place the question of PI in a vacuum, asking me if it should be illegal "in principle", but that's not law. The intent, appearance, skill of council, even the judge and jury, will matter if a case had to come up. You cannot separate the idealized question from the messy details of the fleshy humans.
You're saying "it's complicated and lots of factors would come into play", which is the same thing I'm saying. The fact that it spits out copyright-violating text does not necessarily mean ChatGPT is the one at fault, it's messy.
In what way? You don't seem to know what is decided by a jury or what is decided by a judge. Specifically, what do you think the prompt evidences that it is relevant?
> The fact that it spits out copyright-violating text does not necessarily mean ChatGPT is the one at fault, it's messy.
Actually, that's exactly what it means. There is no defense to copyright infringement of the nature you are discussing. OpenAi is responsible for what it ingests, and the fact that use of its tool can result in these outcomes is solely the responsibility of OpenAI and your misunderstandings otherwise are dense and apparently impenetrable.
Your hypothetical is asinine and completely removed from what is at issue in this lawsuit.
And of course now, reading other posters responding to you in this thread, I'm not the only one pointing out how you are only contributing your own misunderstandings.
I'm not sure how that could even be controversial. Either it does or doesn't. In this case, it does.
https://data.commoncrawl.org/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/inde...
2. I did not see any defense of this nature.
3. Yes and this is the big deal. If the secret code needed to reproduce copyrighted material involves large portions of that copyrighted material already then that's quite a bit different than just verbatim reproductions out of thin air.
4. Yes, if OpenAI wins this case then you could feed into ChatGPT large portions of NYT articles and OpenAI could possibly respond by regurgitating similar such portions of NYT articles in response.