OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in NY Times copyright lawsuit

Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, which are suing OpenAI for allegedly scraping their works to train its AI models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data potentially relevant to the case.

Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so that counsel for The Times and Daily News could perform searches for their copyrighted content in its AI training sets. (Virtual machines are software-based computers that exist within another computer’s operating system, often used for the purposes of testing, backing up data, and running apps.) In a letter, attorneys for the publishers say that they and experts they hired have spent over 150 hours since November 1 searching OpenAI’s training data.

But on November 14, OpenAI engineers erased all the publishers’ search data stored on one of the virtual machines, according to the aforementioned letter, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late Wednesday.

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