What a joke. It's like burglarizing someone's house and then calling the cops when someone else takes your ill-gotten gains.
Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
181–190 of 441 posts
Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
This article says nothing of the sort. The court order is to preserve existing logs they already have, not to disable logging, and hand all the logs over the plaintiffs. OpenAI's objections are mainly that 1/there are too many logs (so they're proposing a sample instead) and that 2/there's identifying data in the logs and so they are being "forced" to anonymize the logs at their expense (even though it's what they wa…
[flagged]
If OpenAI truly didn't keep conversation records for any length of time, they would not be subject to this kind of order. Lots of stateless services get these and are able to defeat them because they never store the user's data. The fact that they store them at all means that they are in scope for a preservation order. It also means that they are in scope for all manner of usage by OpenAI themselves even if a user requests deletion.
Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me, no company has the customers’ best interests in mind. This whole thing is akin to when Apple was refusing to unlock phones for the FBI. Of course, Apple profits by having people think that they take privacy seriously, and they demonstrate it by protecting users’ privacy. Same thing here; OpenAI needs chats to have some expectation of privacy, especially because a large use case of AI is personal advice on thin…
Both OpenAI and NYT are bad. I don't know about NYT's privacy policy, because that's not really the industry they're in, but they did admit to fabricating a story that led to a now 2-year-long war, so.
Yes, but I think at least in this instance, OpenAI needs people to think that what they ask ChatGPT is private. They will have no business model if everyone thought that whatever private question they ask could fall into the hands of a media company and be used for anything. Also, at least when I signed up, you had to provide either a highly trusted email address or phone number to sign up, so your identity is definitely attached to whatever question you ask ChatGPT. They know how high the stakes are for them in this suit.
Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In copyright cases, typically you need to show some kind of harm. NYT is suing for statutory copyright infringement. That means you only need to demonstrate that the copyright infringement, since the infringement alone is considered harm; the actual harm only matters if you're suing for actual damages. This case really comes down to the very unsolved question of whether or not AI training and regurgitation is copyr…
NYT doesn't care about regurgitation. When it was doable, it was spotty enough that no one would rely on it. But now the "trick" doesn't even work anymore (you would paste the start of an article and chatgpt would continue it). What they want is to kill training, and more over, prevent the loss of being the middle-man between events and users.
It sounds like the defendant would much prefer middle-men who do not have the resources to enforce copyright.
Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
#185I wouldn't want to make it out like I think OpenAI is the good guy here. I don't. But conversations people thought they were having with OpenAI in private are now going to be scoured by the New York Times' lawyers. I'm aware of the third party doctrine and that if you put something online it can never be actually private. But I think this also runs counter to people's expectations when they're using the product. In c…
I get the feeling, but that's not what this is. NYTimes has produced credible evidence that OpenAI is simply stealing and republishing their content. The question they have to answer is "to what extent has this happened?" That's a question they fundamentally cannot answer without these chat logs. That's what discovery, especially in a copyright case, is about. Think about it this way. Let's say this were a book store…
> NYTimes has produced credible evidence that OpenAI is simply stealing and republishing their content. The question they have to answer is "to what extent has this happened?"
Credible to whom? In their supposed "investigation", they sent a whole page of text and complex pre-prompting and still failed to get the exact content back word for word. Something users would never do anyways.
And that's probably the best they've got as they didn't publish other attempts.
Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
#186"The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private ChatGPT conversations." As might any plaintiff. NYT might be the first of many others and the lawsuits may not be limited to copyright claims Why has OpenAI collected and stored 20 million conversations (including "deleted chats") What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations By contrast the purpose of NYT's reques…
>What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations
Have you used ChatGPT? Your conversation history is on the left rail
Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
#187Can this legal principle be used on Gmail too?
Of course this principle applies to Gmail too, if you’re willing to accept the absurdity. I could copy-paste copyrighted NYT snippets into emails and send them to everyone I know. Under the same logic, the NYT would be entitled to have access to everyone's Gmail account in order to verify who's sending what and get compensated if anyone is infringing their copyright.
That’s not justice. That’s legal extortion.
I get that people are angry at OpenAI. But let’s not confuse outrage over one company with support for broken systems. Patent and copyright trolls thrive when we normalize overreach, whether it’s AI training data or email threads. If we let corporations weaponize IP law to control every digital whisper, we’re not protecting creators, we’re burying free expression under a mountain of lawsuits.
Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discovery isn't binary yes/no, it involves competing proposals regarding methods and scope for satisfying information requests. Sometimes requests are egregious or excessive, sometimes they are reasonable and subject to excessively zealous pushback. Maybe you didn't read TFA but part of the case history was NYT requesting 1.4 billion records as part of discovery and being successfully challenged by OpenAI as unnecess…
>Discovery isn't binary yes/no, it involves competing proposals regarding methods and scope for satisfying information requests. Sometimes requests are egregious or excessive, sometimes they are reasonable and subject to excessively zealous pushback. There is a court order that OpenAI must produce these documents. OpenAI litigated this issue and lost. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. The court decided…
Meanwhile back in reality, as of today that order is being challenged, and challenging the scope of an interlocutory order in discovery is a normal thing and part of a coherent legal position. So I don't know why you're pretending you don't understand what it means not to "roll over like a beaten dog" in response to overzealous discovery.
>I don't think you read TFA.
It was in TFA. If you don't like their number which characterizes OpenAI's interpretation of what an earlier proposal required, the 20 million proposal was selected over the NYT's 120 million records proposal, which demonstrates the same point about fighting to narrow scope. So I still don't understand why you think the concept of challenging the scope discovery is somehow too mysterious to comprehend.
>You keep going on about the original discovery request, but that's not what the issue is and it's not the issue OpenAI lost on that they are now crying to the public about.
Yeah, because I was replying to a comment about that issue and I'm remaining on topic.
>Also btw, I saw you posting in other comments that OpenAI needs to figure out how to anonymize the data.
You're actually right! My mistake. I guess this makes it make sense to pretend you can't understand why a company would ever push back against the scope of discovery.
Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
#189Wish they'd give a bulk delete interface that lets me choose which chats to keep and which to delete. (i.e. not "Delete All" scorched earth).
Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You're stripping all legitimacy and nuance from the conversation with an overly simplistic response. An overly simplistic claim only deserves an overly simplistic response.
What? The claim is true. The nuance is us discussing if it should be true/allowed. You're simplifying the moral discussion and overall just being rude/dismissive. Comparing rope and an LLM comes across as disingenuous. I struggle to believe that you believe the two are comparable when it comes to the ethics of companies and their impact on society.
> Comparing rope and an LLM comes across as disingenuous.
What makes you feel that? Both are tools, both have a wide array of good and bad uses. Maybe it'd be clearer if you explained why you think the two are incomparable except in cases of disingenuousness?
Remember that things are only compared when they are different -- you wouldn't often compare a thing to itself. So, differences don't inherently make things incomparable.
> I struggle to believe that you believe the two are comparable when it comes to the ethics of companies and their impact on society.
I encourage you to broaden your perspectives. For example: I don't struggle to believe that you disagree with the analogy, because smart people disagree with things all the time.
What kind of a conversation would such a rude, dismissive judgement make, anyways? "I have judged that nobody actually believes anything that disagrees with me, therefore my opinions are unanimous and unrivaled!"