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Comment by VanTheBrand | Hacker News Reader

The part where they go out of the way to call the lawsuit baseless is spin though, and mixing that with this messaging does exactly that, presents a mixed message. The NYT lawsuit is objectively not baseless. OpenAI did train on the Times and chat gpt does output information from that training. That’s the basis of the lawsuit. NYT may lose, this could end up being considered fair use, it might ultimately be a flimsy basis for a lawsuit, but to say it’s baseless (and with nothing to back that up) is spin and makes this message less reassuring.

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No, it's not. It's absolutely standard corporate communications. If they're fighting the lawsuit, that is essentially the only thing they can say about it. Ford Motor Company would say the same thing (well, they'd probably say "meritless and frivolous").

Standard corporate spin, then?

No, this isn't even close to spin, it's just a standard part of defending your case. In the US tort system you need to be constantly publicly saying you did nothing wrong. Any wavering on that point could be used against you in court.

This is a funny thread. You say "No" but then restate the point with slightly different words. As if anything a company says publicly about ongoing litigation isn't spin.

I suppose it's down to how you define "spin". Personally I'm in favor of a definition of the term that doesn't excessively dilute it.

Can you share your definition? This is actually quite puzzling because as far as I know “spin” has always been associated with presenting things in a way that benefits you. Like, decades ago, they could have the show “Bill O’Rilley’s No Spin Zone” and everybody knew the premise was that they argue against guests who were trying to tell a “massaged” version of the story, and that they’d go for some actual truth (fwiw I thought the whole show was full of crap, but the name was not confusing or ambiguous).

I’m not aware of any definition of “spin” where being conventional is a defense against that accusation. Actually, that was the (imagined) value-add of the show, that conventional corporate and political messaging is heavily spun.

Spin, like you illustrate in your comment, has connotations of distorting the truth.

Simply denying the allegations isn't really spinning anything; it's just denying the allegations. And The thing I dislike about characterizing something like this as spin is that it defangs the term by removing all those connotations and instead turning it into just a buzzwordy way of saying, "I disagree with what this person said."

They didn’t just deny the allegations. They called the case baseless. The case is clearly not baseless, in the sense that there’s at least enough of a basis that the court didn’t vacate the order to preserve the chats.

It seems to me that the discussion of whether or not it is spin has turned into a discussion of which party people basically agree with.

My personal opinion is that OpenAI will probably win, or at least get away with a pretty minor fine or something like that. However, the communications coming from both parties in the case should be assumed to be corporate spin until proven otherwise. And, calling an unfinished case baseless is, at least, a bit presumptuous!

That's legalese. You can't interpret legal jargon using vernacular definitions of the terms.

The source is a message intended for mass consumption, so it should not be interpreted in legalese.

How you want the law to work, and how the law works, are not necessarily the same thing.

There's a difference between "we are choosing to phrase it this way" versus "our lawyers told us we have to say this". "Spin" is generally seen as a voluntary action, which makes the former a clearcut case of it, the latter less so.

1) taking your lawyer’s advice is a voluntary action (although it is probably a good one)

2) I don’t understand the distinction being made between voluntary or involuntary, in the sense that a corporation is a thing made up of by people, it doesn’t have a will in-and-of-itself, so the communications it sends must always actually be made by somebody inside the corporation (whether a lawyer, marketing person, or in the unlikely event that somebody lets them out, an engineer).

No? "Spin" implies there was something else they could possibly say.

They could choose to not say it

Indeed. Taken to its conclusion, this thread suggests that corporations are justified in saying whatever they want in order to further their own ends.

Including lies.

I'd like to aim a little higher, maybe towards expecting correspondence with reality?

IOW, yes, there is no law that OpenAi can't try to spin this. But it's still a shitty, non-factually-based choice to make.

I haven't heard that interpretation; I might call it spin of spin.

If you're being held at gunpoint and forced to lie, your words are still a lie. Whether you were forced or not is a separate dimension.

That is unrelated to what the expression means.

I’m typing these words from a brain that has absorbed copyrighted works.

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