OpenAI slams court order that lets NYT read 20 million complete user chats

OpenAI wants a court to reverse a ruling forcing the ChatGPT maker to give 20 million user chats to The New York Times and other news plaintiffs that sued it over alleged copyright infringement. Although OpenAI previously offered 20 million user chats as a counter to the NYT’s demand for 120 million, the AI company says a court order requiring production of the chats is too broad.

“The logs at issue here are complete conversations: each log in the 20 million sample represents a complete exchange of multiple prompt-output pairs between a user and ChatGPT,” OpenAI said today in a filing in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. “Disclosure of those logs is thus much more likely to expose private information [than individual prompt-output pairs], in the same way that eavesdropping on an entire conversation reveals more private information than a 5-second conversation fragment.”

OpenAI’s filing said that “more than 99.99%” of the chats “have nothing to do with this case.” It asked the district court to “vacate the order and order News Plaintiffs to respond to OpenAI’s proposal for identifying relevant logs.” OpenAI could also seek review in a federal court of appeals.

OpenAI posted a message on its website to users today saying that “The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private ChatGPT conversations” in order to “find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall.”

ChatGPT users concerned about privacy have more to worry about than the NYT case. For example, ChatGPT conversations have been found in Google search results and the Google Search Console tool that developers can use to monitor search traffic. OpenAI today said it plans to develop “advanced security features designed to keep your data private, including client-side encryption for your messages with ChatGPT. ”