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Title: OpenAI Accidentally Deleted Potential Evidence in New York Times
Copyright Lawsuit

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/21/14423...

An anonymous reader shares a report: 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. 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. OpenAI tried to recover the data -- and was
mostly successful. However, because the folder structure and file names were
"irretrievably" lost, the recovered data "cannot be used to determine where
the news plaintiffs' copied articles were used to build [OpenAI's] models,"
per the letter. "News plaintiffs have been forced to recreate their work from
scratch using significant person-hours and computer processing time," counsel
for The Times and Daily News wrote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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