Describing OpenAI’s alleged “playbook” for avoiding copyright claims, the news groups accused OpenAI of “failing to take any steps to suspend its regular destruction practices”. There were also “two spikes in mass deletions”, which OpenAI attributed to “technical issues”.
However, OpenAI made sure to retain outputs that could help its defense, the petition filed in court alleged, including data from the accounts cited in the news organizations’ complaints.
News groups cited testimony from Mike Trinh, OpenAI’s associate general counsel, alleging that OpenAI did not take the same precautions in preserving chats that could have been used as evidence against it. “In other words, OpenAI preserved evidence of news plaintiffs deriving their own functions from OpenAI’s products, but removed evidence of third-party users doing so,” the filing said.
The plaintiffs allege that it is unclear how much data was removed, as OpenAI would not share “the most basic information” on its removal practices. But it’s reportedly very clear that OpenAI could have done more to preserve data, as Microsoft apparently had no trouble doing the same with Copilot, the filing said.
The News plaintiffs are hoping the court will agree that OpenAI and Microsoft are not fighting a fair fight by delaying sharing the logs, which they said prevents them from making their strongest case.
They have asked the court to order Microsoft to “immediately” produce the CoPilot logs “in an easily searchable remotely accessible format,” proposing a deadline of January 9 or “within one day of the court’s decision on this motion.”
Microsoft declined Ars’ request for comment.
And as for OpenAI, it wants to know whether deleted logs, including “mass deletions,” can be retrieved, perhaps bringing into litigation millions of ChatGPT conversations that users hoped would never see the light of day again.
In addition to potential sanctions, the news plaintiffs asked the court to issue a protection order preventing OpenAI from permanently deleting users’ temporary and deleted chats. They also want the court to order OpenAI to explain in the lawsuit “the full scope of the deleted output log data for all of its products” and whether those deleted chats can be restored, so that the news plaintiffs can examine them as evidence as well.
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