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OpenAI president forced to read his personal diary entries to jury

arstechnica.com

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Re: OpenAI president forced to read his personal diary entries to jury

#11

Post by ForHackernews »

THansenite wrote: post #4

I honestly don't know how I feel about this. I keep a journal where I can get thoughts out of my head so I can move on. Like the article, its nothing I'd really be ashamed of, but I see it as a kind of personal therapy where I can dump my thoughts. I write with the assumption they are my private thoughts and even I don't have any plans on going back and rereading. I know I'm not a CEO, but even I wouldn't want my pri…

You have options:

- Don't write it down.

- Delete it before you're subpoenaed.

- Mail it to your attorney.

Re: OpenAI president forced to read his personal diary entries to jury

#12

Post by THansenite »

misiti3780 wrote: post #3

Who keeps a personal diary in 2026?

It is actually a decent sized community. As someone who works in technology, I enjoy the aspect of actually creating something physical when so much is ones and zeros on silicone. While not daily, I try to journal regularly as a practice to slow down, focus my thoughts, and use it as therapy to get frustrations/emotions/musings out so I can move on.

Re: OpenAI president forced to read his personal diary entries to jury

#13

Post by bonsai_spool »

lesuorac wrote: post #9
THansenite wrote: post #4

I honestly don't know how I feel about this. I keep a journal where I can get thoughts out of my head so I can move on. Like the article, its nothing I'd really be ashamed of, but I see it as a kind of personal therapy where I can dump my thoughts. I write with the assumption they are my private thoughts and even I don't have any plans on going back and rereading. I know I'm not a CEO, but even I wouldn't want my pri…

Yeah, the Framers of the constitution felt the same as you and the 5th amendment used to apply to your belongings as well so a diary you wrote couldn't be used against you.

> your belongings as well so a diary you wrote couldn't be used against you

What's the history around this? And don't these protections only relate to criminal proceedings?

edit: seems the parent is referring to the historical entity of the mere evidence rule which isn't the same as saying that the Framers believed a certain interpretation for the 4/5th amendments.

Re: OpenAI president forced to read his personal diary entries to jury

#14

Post by yieldcrv »

Xunjin wrote: post #7
koolba wrote: post #2

From the article, emphasis mine: > Additionally, Brockman’s journal showed him grappling with whether voting against Musk’s plan or for Musk’s ejection from the board would be morally wrong. > “Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” Brockman wrote in another entry. “ It’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. That’d be pretty morally bankrupt. ” This is pretty damning for OpenAI…

Another part also says: "After Musk announced he was resigning from OpenAI in February 2018, Musk gave a departing speech at an all-hands meeting, Brockman testified. In front of about 40 OpenAI employees, Musk said that he was leaving because the only viable path that he saw forward was for OpenAI to merge with Tesla. However, the other leaders did not think so, Musk said, choosing a different path that Musk would n…

he didn’t so they litigate what did happen

Re: OpenAI president forced to read his personal diary entries to jury

#15

Post by mcmcmc »

Xunjin wrote: post #7
koolba wrote: post #2

From the article, emphasis mine: > Additionally, Brockman’s journal showed him grappling with whether voting against Musk’s plan or for Musk’s ejection from the board would be morally wrong. > “Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” Brockman wrote in another entry. “ It’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. That’d be pretty morally bankrupt. ” This is pretty damning for OpenAI…

Another part also says: "After Musk announced he was resigning from OpenAI in February 2018, Musk gave a departing speech at an all-hands meeting, Brockman testified. In front of about 40 OpenAI employees, Musk said that he was leaving because the only viable path that he saw forward was for OpenAI to merge with Tesla. However, the other leaders did not think so, Musk said, choosing a different path that Musk would n…

Yep. Both sides just look like assholes

Re: OpenAI president forced to read his personal diary entries to jury

#16

Post by balance006 »

koolba wrote: post #2

From the article, emphasis mine: > Additionally, Brockman’s journal showed him grappling with whether voting against Musk’s plan or for Musk’s ejection from the board would be morally wrong. > “Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” Brockman wrote in another entry. “ It’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. That’d be pretty morally bankrupt. ” This is pretty damning for OpenAI…

Doing fractional Head of AI work for mid-market operators for the past year, I get the same question every discovery call: "what happens to my data and my workflow if [vendor] gets bought, sued, or pivots?"

The Brockman diary is the rare moment where the people running the vendor write the answer in their own words, in real time. What it actually shows is the people closest to the conversion knew the governance risk was real and contested. Not an argument for picking sides between Musk and Altman. An argument for the boring practitioner version: if your business depends on a model API, your contract and your switching cost are the only things that matter. The internal ethics of the vendor are not a hedge.

We default to Claude for client work right now with the explicit caveat that we'd swap to whichever model is best and cheapest in 18 months, and we structure the stack so they can. That's the lesson the diary should put on every CTO's whiteboard, regardless of who they think is the bad actor.

Re: OpenAI president forced to read his personal diary entries to jury

#17

Post by solomatov »

lesuorac wrote: post #9
THansenite wrote: post #4

I honestly don't know how I feel about this. I keep a journal where I can get thoughts out of my head so I can move on. Like the article, its nothing I'd really be ashamed of, but I see it as a kind of personal therapy where I can dump my thoughts. I write with the assumption they are my private thoughts and even I don't have any plans on going back and rereading. I know I'm not a CEO, but even I wouldn't want my pri…

Yeah, the Framers of the constitution felt the same as you and the 5th amendment used to apply to your belongings as well so a diary you wrote couldn't be used against you.

Could you share links about this? When it turned into a different interpretation?

Re: OpenAI president forced to read his personal diary entries to jury

#20

Post by balance006 »

THansenite wrote: post #4

I honestly don't know how I feel about this. I keep a journal where I can get thoughts out of my head so I can move on. Like the article, its nothing I'd really be ashamed of, but I see it as a kind of personal therapy where I can dump my thoughts. I write with the assumption they are my private thoughts and even I don't have any plans on going back and rereading. I know I'm not a CEO, but even I wouldn't want my pri…

This is the angle I think is going to matter for everyone reading.

A growing share of operators I work with use ChatGPT and Claude the way Brockman used a private journal: to think out loud, draft messy first thoughts, vent about colleagues, work through hard decisions. They treat the chat window as an extension of the inside of their head.

It's not. Every prompt is logged on the vendor side and is discoverable in litigation. Most enterprise buyers I deal with have not connected this dot. Their company's policy on email retention is rigorous; their policy on AI chat retention is "default settings, whatever those are."

Brockman's diary being read aloud in court is going to do for AI chat history what email did for casual workplace correspondence twenty years ago. People are going to start writing as if a lawyer might read it eventually. And the thoughtful internal candor that kept companies honest is going to migrate somewhere even less discoverable, or stop happening at all.

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