New York Times says OpenAI hid evidence in ChatGPT copyright trial

The New York Times and The Daily News have accused OpenAI of hiding evidence in the ongoing copyright lawsuit, claiming the company lied about its ability to search customer chat logs and training datasets for copyrighted works. The plaintiffs allege that in a court-ordered deposition, OpenAI data privacy engineer Vinnie Monaco revealed the company had already conducted internal searches of its training corpus for copyrighted journalism and had amassed a database of about 78 million de-identified ChatGPT conversations to evaluate infringement. The outlets also claim OpenAI implemented a "Bloom" filter as part of "Project Giraffe" to detect regurgitation in outputs shortly after the lawsuit was filed. The plaintiffs argue that OpenAI made it needlessly difficult to obtain information it had already collected, including submitting a heavily redacted sample of 20 million chat logs that the court deemed "unusable," and allegedly deleting billions of ChatGPT outputs in violation of a court preservation order. They are now asking the judge to discipline OpenAI and prevent it from using the chat log sample as evidence.