Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

remember a corporation generally is an object owned by some people. Do you trust "unspecified future group of people" with your privacy? You can't. Best we can do is understand the information architecture and act accordingly.

latexr2• 8 months ago

- any corporation

I don’t recall seeing many food, furniture, plant, or generally anything not related to tech talking about trust, security, and privacy as guiding principles.

hlieberman• 8 months ago

An incredibly cynical attempt at spin from a former non-profit that renounced its founding principles. A class act, all around.

techblueberry• 8 months ago

I’ll trust the people not asking for a Government bailout thank you very much.

jcranmer3• 8 months ago

"How dare the New York Times demand access to our vault of everything-we-keep to figure out if we're a bunch of lying asses. We must resist them in the name of user privacy! Signed, the people who have scraped literally everything to incorporate it into the products we make."

OpenAI may be trying to paint themselves as the goody-two-shoes here, but they're not.

greyman2• 8 months ago

But that vault can contain conversation between me and chatgpt, which I willingly did, but with the expectation that only openai has access to it. Why should some lawyer working for NYT have access to it? OpenAI is precisely correct, no matter what other motives could be there.

jcranmer3• 8 months ago

https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/

We may use Personal Data for the following purposes: [...] To comply with legal obligations and to protect the rights, privacy, safety, or property of our users, OpenAI, or third parties.

OpenAI outright says it will give your conversations to people like lawyers.

If you thought they wouldn't give it out to third parties, you not only have not read OpenAI's privacy policy, you've not read any privacy policy from a big tech company (because all of them are basically maximalist "your privacy is important, we'll share your data only with us and people who we deem worthy of it, which turns out to be everybody.")

mkipper• 8 months ago

but with the expectation that only openai has access to it

You can argue about "the expectation" of privacy all you want, but this is completely detached from reality. My assumption is that almost no third parties I share information with have magic immunity that prevents the information from being used in a legal action involving them.

Maybe my doctor? Maybe my lawyer? IANAL but I'm not even confident in those. If I text my friend saying their party last night was great and they're in court later and need to prove their whereabouts that night, I understand that my text is going to be used as evidence. That might be a private conversation, but it's not my data when I send it to someone else and give them permission to store it forever.

buellerbueller3• 8 months ago

Listen, man, I willingly did that murder, but with the expectation that no one would know about it, except the victim. Why should some lawyer working for the government have access to it?

adolph• 8 months ago

Cynicism aside, this seems like an attempt to prune back a potentially excessive legal discovery demand by appealing to public opinion.

  The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private 
  ChatGPT conversations. They claim they might find examples of you using 
  ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall.

indoordin0saur• 8 months ago

Yeah, I'm not sure why everyone feels the need to take a side here. Both of these organizations are ghoulish.

mmooss6• 8 months ago

How is the NYT like OpenAI, or 'ghoulish'?

o11c2• 8 months ago

The NYT has problems with being a stooge of the military-industrial complex, but I really don't see them doing anything wrong in this case.

grugagag• 8 months ago

Hypocrisy at best, this wall of text is not even penned by a human and yet they want us to believe they care about user privacy..

miltonlost• 8 months ago

This is the basic discovery process when OpenAI commits IP theft. They're trying to misinform the public of how justice process works.

mapontosevenths4• 8 months ago

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The constitution is clear that the purpose of intellectual property is to promote progress. I feel that OpenAI is on the right side of that and this is not IP theft as long as they aren't reproducing others work in a non-transformative way.

Training the AI is clearly transformative (and lossy to boot). Giving the AI the ability to scrape and paraphrase others work is less clear and both sides each have valid arguments. I don't envy the judges that must make that call.

etchalon3• 8 months ago

If they're reproducing NY Times articles, in full, that that is non-transformative. That's the point of the case.

eur0pa• 8 months ago

This is laughable

rpdillon19• 8 months ago

I wouldn't want to make it out like I think OpenAI is the good guy here. I don't.

But conversations people thought they were having with OpenAI in private are now going to be scoured by the New York Times' lawyers. I'm aware of the third party doctrine and that if you put something online it can never be actually private. But I think this also runs counter to people's expectations when they're using the product.

In copyright cases, typically you need to show some kind of harm. This case is unusual because the New York Times can't point to any harm, so they have to trawl through private conversations OpenAI's customers have had with their service to see if they can find any.

It's quite literally a fishing expedition.

Sherveen• 8 months ago

Yeah, everyone else in the comments so far is acting emotionally, but --

As a fan and DAU of both OpenAI and the NYT, this is just a weird discovery demand and there should be another pathway for these two to move fwd in this case (NYT to get some semblance of understanding, OAI protecting end-user privacy).

totallymike6• 8 months ago

It sounds like the alternate path you're suggesting is for NYT to stop being wrong and let OpenAI continue being right, which doesn't sound much like a compromise to me.

Alex2037• 8 months ago

But conversations people thought they were having with OpenAI in private

...had never been private in the first place.

not only is the data used for refining the models, OpenAI had also shariah policed plenty of people for generating erotica.

IlikeKitties• 8 months ago

OpenAI had also shariah policed plenty of people for generating erotica.

That framing is retorically brilliant if you think about it. I will use that more. Chat Sharia Law for Chat Control. Mass Sharia Surveillance from flock etc.

mock-possum• 8 months ago

Yeah I don’t get why more people don’t understand this - why would you think your conversation was private when it wasnt actually private. Have you not been paying attention.

Workaccount25• 8 months ago

This is about private chats, which are not used for training and only stored for 30 days.

Also, you need to understand, that for huge corps like OpenAI, the lying on your ToS will do orders of magnitude more damage to your brand than what you would gain through training on <1% more user chats. So no, they are not lying when they say they don't train on private chats.

vintagedave3• 8 months ago

100% agreed. In the time you wrote this, I also posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901054

I felt quite some disappointment with the comments I saw on the thread at that time.

cogman10• 8 months ago

I get the feeling, but that's not what this is.

NYTimes has produced credible evidence that OpenAI is simply stealing and republishing their content. The question they have to answer is "to what extent has this happened?"

That's a question they fundamentally cannot answer without these chat logs.

That's what discovery, especially in a copyright case, is about.

Think about it this way. Let's say this were a book store selling illegal copies of books. A very reasonable discovery request would be "Show me your sales logs". The whole log needs to be produced otherwise you can't really trust that this is the real log.

That's what NYTimes lawyers are after. They want the chat logs so they can do their own searches to find NYTimes text within the responses. They can't know how often that's happened and OpenAI has an obvious incentive to simply say "Oh that never happened".

And the reason this evidence is relevant is it will directly feed into how much money NYT and OpenAI will ultimately settle for. If this never happens then the amount will be low. If it happens a lot the amount will be high. And if it goes to trial it will be used in the damages portion assuming NYT wins.

The user has no right to privacy. The same as how any internet service can be (and have been) compelled to produce private messages.

sroussey4• 8 months ago

The user has no right to privacy. The same as how any internet service can be (and have been) compelled to produce private messages.

This is nonsense. I’ve personally been involved in these things, and fought to protect user privacy at all levels and never lost.

tantalor• 8 months ago

The user has no right to privacy

The correct term for this is prima facie right.

You do have a right to privacy (arguably) but it is outweighed by the interest of enforcing the rights of others under copyright law.

Similarly, liberty is a prima facie right; you can be arrested for committing a crime.

glenstein5• 8 months ago

That's what NYTimes lawyers are after. They want the chat logs so they can do their own searches to find NYTimes text within the responses.

The trouble with this logic is NYT already made that argument and lost as applied to an original discovery scope of 1.4 billion records. The question now is about a lower scope and about the means of review, and proposed processes for anonymization.

They have a right to some form of discovery, but not to a blank check extrapolation that sidesteps legitimate privacy issues raised both in OpenAIs statement as well as throughout this thread.

observationist• 8 months ago

You don't hate the media nearly enough.

"Credible" my ass. They hired "experts" who used prompt engineering and thousands of repetitions to find highly unusual and specific methods of eliciting text from training data that matched their articles. OpenAI has taken measures to limit such methods and prevent arbitrary wholesale reproduction of copyrighted content since that time. That would have been the end of the situation if NYT was engaging in good faith.

The NYT is after what they consider "their" piece of the pie. They want to insert themselves as middlemen - pure rent seeking, second hander, sleazy lawyer behavior. They haven't been injured, they were already dying, and this lawsuit is a hail mary attempt at grifting some life support.

Behavior like that of the NYT is why we can't have nice things. They're not entitled to exist, and by engaging in behavior like this, it makes me want them to stop existing, the faster, the better.

Copyright law is what you get when a bunch of layers figure out how to encode monetization of IP rights into the legal system, having paid legislators off over decades, such that the people that make the most money off of copyrights are effectively hoarding those copyrights and never actually produce anything or add value to the system. They rentseek, gatekeep, and viciously drive off any attempts at reform or competition. Institutions that once produced valuable content instead coast on the efforts of their predecessors, and invest proceeds into lawsuits, lobbying, and purchase of more IP.

They - the NYT - are exploiting a finely tuned and deliberately crafted set of laws meant to screw actual producers out of percentages. I'm not a huge OpenAI fan, but IP laws are a whole different level of corrupt stupidity at the societal scale. It's gotcha games all the way down, and we should absolutely and ruthlessly burn down that system of rules and salt the ground over it. There are trivially better systems that can be explained in a single paragraph, instead of requiring books worth of legal code and complexities.

antonvs2• 8 months ago

The user has no right to privacy. The same as how any internet service can be (and have been) compelled to produce private messages.

The legal term is "expectation of privacy", and it does exist, albeit increasingly weakly in the US. There are exceptions to that, such as a subpoena, but that doesn't mean anyone can subpoena anything for any reason. There has to be a legal justification.

It's not clear to me that such a justification exists in this case.

realusername2• 8 months ago

NYTimes has produced credible evidence that OpenAI is simply stealing and republishing their content. The question they have to answer is "to what extent has this happened?"

Credible to whom? In their supposed "investigation", they sent a whole page of text and complex pre-prompting and still failed to get the exact content back word for word. Something users would never do anyways.

And that's probably the best they've got as they didn't publish other attempts.

terminalshort10• 8 months ago

Even if OpenAI is reproducing pieces of NYT articles, they still have a difficult argument because in no way is is a practical means of accessing paywalled NYT content, especially compared to alternatives. The entire value proposition of the NYT is news coverage, and probably 99.9% of their page views are from stories posted so recently that they aren't even in the training set of LLMs yet. If I want to reproduce a NYT story from LLM it's a prompt engineering mess, and I can only get old ones. On the other hand I can read any NYT story from today by archiving it: https://archive.is/5iVIE. So why is the NYT suing OpenAI and not the Internet Archive?

throw20251110• 8 months ago

Think about it this way. Let's say this were a book store selling illegal copies of books. A very reasonable discovery request would be "Show me your sales logs". The whole log needs to be produced otherwise you can't really trust that this is the real log.

Your claim doesn’t hold up, my friend. It’s inaccurate because nobody archives an entire dialogue with a seller for the record, and you certainly don’t have to show identification to purchase a book.

protocolture2• 8 months ago

NYTimes has produced credible evidence that OpenAI is simply stealing and republishing their content

They shouldnt have any rights to data after its released.

That's a question they fundamentally cannot answer without these chat logs.

They are causing more damage than anything chatGPT could have caused to NYT. Privacy needs to be held higher than corporate privilege.

Think about it this way. Let's say this were a book store selling illegal copies of books.

Think of it this way, no book should be illegal.

They can't know how often that's happened and OpenAI has an obvious incentive to simply say "Oh that never happened".

NYT glazers do more to uphold OpenAI as a privacy respecting platform than OpenAI has ever done.

If this never happens then the amount will be low.

Should be zero, plus compensation to the affected OpenAI users from NYT.

The user has no right to privacy.

And this needs to be remedied immediately.

The same as how any internet service can be (and have been) compelled to produce private messages.

And this needs to be remedied immediately.

rpdillon19• 8 months ago

It's not credible. Using AI to regurgitate news articles is not a good use of the tool, and it is not credible that any statistically significant portion of their user base is using the tool for that.

Workaccount25• 8 months ago

The original lawsuit has lots of examples of ChatGPT (3.5? 4?) regurgitating article...snippets. They could get a few paragraphs with ~80-90% perfect replication. But certainly not full articles, with full accuracy.

This wasn't solid enough for a summary judgement, and it seems the labs have largely figured out how to stop the models from doing this. So it looks like NYT wants to comb all user chats rather than pay a team of people tens of thousands a day to try an coax articles out of ChatGPT-5.

jcranmer3• 8 months ago

In copyright cases, typically you need to show some kind of harm.

NYT is suing for statutory copyright infringement. That means you only need to demonstrate that the copyright infringement, since the infringement alone is considered harm; the actual harm only matters if you're suing for actual damages.

This case really comes down to the very unsolved question of whether or not AI training and regurgitation is copyright infringement, and if so, if it's fair use. The actual ways the AI is being used is thus very relevant for the case, and totally within the bounds of discovery. Of course, OpenAI has also been engaging this lawsuit with unclean hands in the first place (see some of their earlier discovery dispute fuckery), and they're one of the companies with the strongest "the law doesn't apply to US because we're AI and big tech" swagger.

Workaccount25• 8 months ago

NYT doesn't care about regurgitation. When it was doable, it was spotty enough that no one would rely on it. But now the "trick" doesn't even work anymore (you would paste the start of an article and chatgpt would continue it).

What they want is to kill training, and more over, prevent the loss of being the middle-man between events and users.

troyvit• 8 months ago

It's a part of privacy policy boilerplate that if a company is compelled by the courts to give up its logs it'll do it. I'm sure all of OpenAI's users read that policy before they started spilling their guts to a bot, right? Or at least had an LLM summarize it for them?

Rastonbury• 8 months ago

This is it isn't it? For any technology, I don't think anyone should have the expectation of privacy from lawyers if the company who has your data is brought to court

Noaidi• 8 months ago

To show harm they need the proof, this is the point of the lawsuit. They have sufficient evidence that OpenAI was scraping the web and the NY Times.

When Altman says "They claim they might find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall." he is blatantly misrepresenting the case.

https://smithhopen.com/2025/07/17/nyt-v-openai-microsoft-ai-...

"The lawsuit focuses on using copyrighted material for AI training. The NYT says OpenAI and Microsoft copied vast amounts of its content. They did this to build generative AI tools. These tools can output near-exact copies of NYT articles. Therefore, the NYT argues this breaks copyright laws. It also hurts journalism by skipping paywalls and cutting traffic to original sites. The complaint shows examples where ChatGPT mimics NYT stories closely. This could lead to money loss and harm from AI errors, called hallucinations."

This has nothing to do with the users, it has everything to do with OpenAI profiting off of pirated copyrighted material.

Also, Altmans is getting scared because the NY Times proved to the judge that CahtGPT copied many articles:

"2025 brings big steps in the case. On March 26, 2025, Judge Sidney Stein rejected most of OpenAI’s dismissal motion. This lets the NYT’s main copyright claims go ahead. The judge pointed to “many” examples of ChatGPT copying NYT articles. He found them enough to continue. This ruling dropped some side claims, like unfair competition. But it kept direct and contributory infringement, plus DMCA breaches."

rpdillon19• 8 months ago

Training has sometimes been held to be fair use under certain circumstances, but in determining fair use, one of the four factors that is considered is how it affects the market for the work being infringed. I would expect that determining to what degree it's regurgitating the New York Times' content is part of that analysis.

terminalshort10• 8 months ago

The lawsuit focuses on using copyrighted material for AI training

Well that's going to go pretty poorly for them considering it has already been ruled fair use twice: https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/two-california-distr...

On the other hand, distributing copies of NYT content is actually a breach of copyright, but only if the NYT can prove it was actually happening.

otterley8• 8 months ago

This case is unusual because the New York Times can't point to any harm

It helps to read the complaint. If that was the case, the case would have been subject to a Rule 12(b)(6) (failure to state a claim for which relief can be granted) challenge and closed.

Complaint: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...

See pages 60ff.

rpdillon19• 8 months ago

My observation is that section does not articulate any harm. It _claims_ harm, but doesn't actually explain what the harm is. Reduced profits? Lower readership? All they say is "OpenAI violated our copyrights, and we deserve money."

167. As a direct and proximate result of Defendants’ infringing conduct alleged herein, The Times has sustained and will continue to sustain substantial, immediate, and irreparable injury for which there is no adequate remedy at law. Unless Defendants’ infringing conduct is enjoined by this Court, Defendants have demonstrated an intent to continue to infringe the copyrighted works. The Times therefore is entitled to permanent injunctive relief restraining and enjoining Defendants’ ongoing infringing conduct. 168. The Times is further entitled to recover statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits, attorneys’ fees, and other remedies provided by law.

They're simply claiming harm, nothing more. I want to see injuries, scars, and blood if there's harm. As far as I can tell, the NYT was on the ropes long before AI came along. If they could actually articulate any harm, they wouldn't need to read through everyone's chats.

themafia2• 8 months ago

having with OpenAI in private

I don't blieve that OpenAI, or any American corporation, has the wherewithal to actually maintain _your_ privacy in the face of _their_ profitability.

typically you need to show some kind of harm.

You copied my material without my permission. I've been harmed. That right is independent of pricing. Otherwise Napster would never have generated legal cases.

It's quite literally a fishing expedition.

It's why American courts are awesome.

stocksinsmocks• 8 months ago

No doubt. I’m sure NYT sees an opportunity to buy a few more years of life support by pickpocketing the conductor of the AI gravy train. When Sam Altman and the Sulzbergers fight though, as a normal person, my hope is that they destroy each other.

I think the winner are Chinese (and by extension OSS) models as they can ignore copyright. A net win, I think.

phendrenad22• 8 months ago

This would allow them to access millions of user conversations that are unrelated to the case

It feels like the NYT is really fishing for inside information on how GPT is used so they can run statistical analysis and write articles about it. I.E. if they find examples of racism, they can get some great articles about how racism is rampant on GPT or something.

ozgrakkurt• 8 months ago

It is better if it is out in the open compared to just some select few diabolical organizations having access to it

nlh• 8 months ago

Man, maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but it's not often that I read a post that literally makes my skin crawl.

This is so transparently icky. "Oh woe is us! We're being sued and we're looking out for YOU the user, who is definitely not the product. We are just a 'lil 'ol (near) trillion-dollar business trying to protect you!"

Come ON.

Look I don't actually know who's in the right in the OAI vs. NYT dispute, and frankly I personally lean more toward the side the says that you are allowed to train models on the world's information as long as you consume it legally and don't violate copyright.

But this transparent attempt to get user sympathy under insanely disingenuous pretenses is just absurd.

greyman2• 8 months ago

Why it is absurd? Conversation between me and ChatGPT can be read by a lawyer working for NYT, and that is what is absurd.

HelloMcFly• 8 months ago

OpenAI has seemingly done everything they can to put publishers in a position to make this demand, and they've certainly not done anything to make it impossible for them to respond to it. Is there a better, more privacy minded way for NYT to get the data they need? Probably, I'm not smart enough to understand all the things that go into such a decision. But I know I don't view them as the villain for asking, and I also know I don't view OpenAI as some sort of guardian of my or my data's best interests.

nerdjon• 8 months ago

This screams just as genuine as Google saying anything about Privacy.

Both companies are clearly wrong here. There is a small part of me that kinda wants openai to loose this, just so maybe it will be a wake up call to people putting in way too personal of information into these services? Am I too hopeful here that people will learn anything...

Fundamentally I agree with what they are saying though, just don't find it genuine in the slightest coming from them.

stevarino• 8 months ago

Its clearly propaganda. "Your data belongs to you." I'm sure the ToS says otherwise, as OpenAI likely owns and utilizes this data. Yes, they say they are working on end-to-end encryption (whatever that means when they control one end), but that is just a proposal at this point.

Also their framing of the NYT intent makes me strongly distrust anything they say. Sit down with a third party interviewer who asks challenging questions, and I'll pay attention.

Forgeties798• 8 months ago

your data belongs to you

…”as does any culpability for poisoning yourself, suicide, and anything else we clearly enabled but don’t want to be blamed for!”

Edit: honestly I’m surprised I left out the bit where they just indiscriminately scraped everything they could online to train these models. The stones to go “your data belongs to you” as they clearly feel entitled to our data is unbelievably absurd

preinheimer• 8 months ago

"Your data belongs to you" but we can take any of your data we can find and use it for free for ever, without crediting you, notifying you, or giving you any way of having it removed.

outside12343• 8 months ago

Honestly the sooner OpenAI goes bankrupt the better. Just a totally corrupt firm.

fireflash38• 8 months ago

I really should take the "invest in companies you hate" advice seriously.

98codes• 8 months ago

I got one sentence in and thought to myself, "This is about discovery, isn't it?"

And lo, complaints about plaintiffs started before I even had to scroll. If this company hadn't willy-nilly done everything they could to vacuum up the world's data, wherever it may be, however it may have been protected, then maybe they wouldn't be in this predicament.

rpdillon19• 8 months ago

How do you feel about Google vacuuming up the world's data when they created a search engine? I feel like everybody just ignores this because Google was ostensibly sending traffic to the resulting site. The actual infringement of scraping should be identical between OpenAI and Google. Why is nobody complaining about Google scraping their sites? Is it only because they're getting paid off to not complain?

Everybody acts like this is a moral argument when really it's about whether or not they're getting a piece of the pie.

stefan_2• 8 months ago

Ironically there is precedent of Google caring more about this. When they realized location timeline was a gigantic fed honeypot, they made it per-device, locally stored only. No open letters were written in the process of.

Apreche• 8 months ago

Says the people who scraped as much private information as they could get their hands on to train their bots in the first place.

unyttigfjelltol• 8 months ago

If Donald Trump used this OpenAI product to-- who knows-- brainstorm Truth Social content, and his chats were produced to the NYT as well as its consultants and lawyers, who would believe Mr. Trump's content remained secure, confidential and protected from misuse against his wishes?

That's simply a function of the fact it's a controversial news organization running a dragnet on private communications to a technology platform.

"Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law."

nrhrjrjrjtntbt2• 8 months ago

Open AI deservedly getting a beating in this HN comments section but any comments about NYT overreach and what it means in general?

And what if they for example find evidence of X other thing such as:

1. Something useful for a story, maybe they follow up in parallel. Know who to interview and what to ask?

2. A crime.

3. An ongoing crime.

4. Something else they can sue someone else for.

5. Top secret information

great_wubwub2• 8 months ago

5. Top secret information

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers

AlienRobot3• 8 months ago

1. That sounds useful.

2. That sounds useful.

3. That sounds useful.

4. That sounds useful.

5. That sounds useful.

Are these supposed to be examples of things that shouldn't be found out about? This has to be the worst pro-privacy argument I've ever seen on the internet. "Privacy is good because they will find out about our crimes"

totallymike6• 8 months ago

1-5: not a concern

It'll be the lawyers who need to go through the data, and given the scale of it, they won't be able to do anything more than trawl for the evidence they need and find specific examples to cite. They don't give a shit if you're asking chatgpt how to put a hit out on your ex, and they're not there to editorialize.

I wont pretend to guess* how they'll perform the discovery, but I highly doubt it will result in humans reading more than a handful of the records in total outside of the ones found via whatever method they automate the discovery process.

If there's top secret information in there, and it was somehow stumbled upon by one of these lawyers or a paralegal somewhere, I find it impossibly unlikely they'd be stupid enough to do anything other than run directly to whomever is the rightful possessor of said information and say "hey we found this in this place it shouldn't be" and then let them deal with it. Which is what we'd want them to do.

*Though if I had to speculate on how they'd do it, I do think the funniest way would be to feed the records back into chatgpt and ask it to point out all the times the records show evidence of infringement

vintagedave3• 8 months ago

Almost every comment (five) so far is against this: 'An incredibly cynical attempt at spin', 'How dare the New York Times demand access to our vault of everything-we-keep to figure out if we're a bunch of lying asses', etc.

In direct contrast: I fully agree with OpenAI here. We can have a more nuanced opinion than 'piracy to train AI is bad therefore refusing to share chats is bad', which sounds absurd but is genuinely how one of the other comments follows logic.

Privacy is paramount. People _trust_ that their chats are private: they ask sensitive questions, ones to do with intensely personal or private or confidential things. For that to be broken -- for a company to force users to have their private data accessed -- is vile.

The tech community has largely stood against this kind of thing when it's been invasive scanning of private messages, tracking user data, etc. I hope we can collectively be better (I'm using ethical terms for a reason) than the other replies show. We don't have to support OpenAI's actions in order to oppose the NYT's actions.

glenstein5• 8 months ago

I suspect that many of those comments are from the Philosopher's Chair (aka bathroom), and are not aspiring to be literal answers but are ways of saying "OpenAI Bad". But to your point there should be privacy preserving ways to comply, like user anonymization, tailored searches and so on. It sounds like the NYT is proposing a random sampling of user data. But couldn't they instead do a random sampling of their most widely read articles, for positive hits, rather than reviewing content on a case by case basis?

vintagedave3• 8 months ago

I hadn't heard of the philosopher's chair before, but I laughed :) Yes, I think those views were one-sided (OpenAI Bad) without thinking through other viewpoints.

IMO we can have multiple views over multiple companies and actions. And the sort of discussions I value here on HN are ones where people share insight, thought, show some amount of deeper thinking. I wanted to challenge for that with my comment.

_If_ we agree the NYT even has a reason to examine chats -- and I think even that should be where the conversation is -- I agree that there should be other ways to achieve it without violating privacy.

Planktonne• 8 months ago

The tech community has largely stood against this kind of thing when it's been invasive scanning of private messages, tracking user data

The tech community has been doing the scanning and tracking.

wkat42424• 8 months ago

In direct contrast: I fully agree with OpenAI here. We can have a more nuanced opinion than 'piracy to train AI is bad therefore refusing to share chats is bad', which sounds absurd but is genuinely how one of the other comments follows logic.

These chats only need to be shared because:

- OpenAI pirated masses of content in the first place

- OpenAI refuse to own up to it even now (they spin the NYT claims as "baseless").

I don't agree with them giving my chats out either, but the blame is not with the NYT in my opinion.

We don't have to support OpenAI's actions in order to oppose the NYT's actions.

Well the NYT action is more than just its own. It will set a precedent if they win which means other news outlets can get money from OpenAI as well. Which makes a lot of sense, after all they have billions to invest in hardware, why not in content??

And what alternative do they have? Without OpenAI giving access to the source materials used (I assume this was already asked for because it is the most obvious route) there is not much else they can do. And OpenAI won't do that because it will prove the NYT point and will cause them to have to pay a lot to half the world.

It's important that this case is made, not just for the NYT but for journalism in general.

dangus• 8 months ago

OpenAI is the one who chose to store the information. Nobody twisted their arm to do so.

If you store data it can come up in discovery during lawsuits and criminal cases. Period.

E.g., storing illegal materials on Google Drive, Google WILL turn that over to the authorities if there’s a warrant or lawsuit that demands it in discovery.

E.g., my CEO writes an email telling the CFO that he doesn’t want to issue a safety recall because it’ll cost too much money. If I sue the company for injuring me through a product they know to be defective, that civil suit subpoena can ask for all emails discussing the matter and there’s no magical wall of privacy where the company can just say “no that’s private information.”

At the same time, I don’t get to trawl through the company’s emails and use some email the CEO flirting with their secretary as admissible evidence.

There are many ways the court is able to ensure privacy for the individuals. Sexual assault victims don’t have their evidence blasted across the the airwaves just because the court needs to examine that physical evidence.

The only way to avoid this is to not collect the data in the first place, which is where end to end encryption with user-controlled keys or simply not collecting information comes into play.

BitsAndObjects• 8 months ago

So why aren’t they offering for an independent auditor to come into OpenAI and inspect their data (without taking it outside of OpenAI’s systems)?

Probably because they have a lot to hide, a lot to lose, and no interest in fair play.

Theoretically, they could prove their tools aren’t being used to doing anything wrong but practically, we all know they can’t because they are actually in the wrong (in both the moral and, IMO though IANAL, the legal sense). They know it, we know it, the only problem is breaking the ridiculous walled garden that stops the courts from ‘knowing’ it.

glenstein5• 8 months ago

By the same token, why isn't NYT proposing something like that rather than the world's largest random sampling?

You don't have to think that OpenAI is good to think there's a legitimate issue over exposing data to a third party for discovery. One could see the Times discovering something in private conversations outside the scope of the case, but through their own interpretation of journalistic necessity, believe it's something they're obligated to publish.

Part of OpenAI holding up their side of the bargain on user data, to the extent they do, is that they don't roll over like a beaten dog to accommodate unconditional discovery requests.

freejazz17• 8 months ago

By the same token, why isn't NYT proposing something like that rather than the world's largest random sampling?

It's OpenAI's data, there is a protective order in the case and OpenAI already agreed to anonymize it all.

Part of OpenAI holding up their side of the bargain on user data, to the extent they do, is that they don't roll over like a beaten dog to accommodate unconditional discovery requests.

lol... what?

terminalshort10• 8 months ago

Theoretically, they could prove their tools aren’t being used to doing anything wrong

That is proving a negative. You are never required to prove a negative.

the only problem is breaking the ridiculous walled garden that stops the courts from ‘knowing’ it.

The "problem" of privacy?

sroussey4• 8 months ago

I keep asking ChatGPT how to get NYT articles for free and then add lots of vulgar murderous things about their lawyers in the same message. It’s a private thought to an AI, so the attorneys can’t complain, right?

ale42• 8 months ago

Why should OpenAI keep those conversations in the first point? (of course the answer is obvious) If they didn't keep them, they wouldn't have anything to hand over, and they would have protected users' privacy MUCH better. This is just as good as Facebook or Google care about their users' privacy.

HPsquared4• 8 months ago

They didn't keep temporary chats. They were ordered to keep those as part of this case.

gruez4• 8 months ago

They didn't keep temporary chats

I thought they did? The warning currently says

This chat won't appear in history, use or update ChatGPT's memory, or be used to train our models. For safety purposes, we may keep a copy of this chat for up to 30 days.

But AFAIK it was this way before the lawsuit as well.

bgwalter• 8 months ago

The heroic fight for privacy apparently includes having an ex-NSA director on the board and building user dossiers:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/what-llms-kno...

At some point they'll monetize these dossiers.

amelius• 8 months ago

Maybe they should release some kind of NYT browser add-on, so users can cooperatively share their OpenAI data?

mrbungie• 8 months ago

OpenAI would/could say the data is biased (maybe even purposefully).

HPsquared4• 8 months ago

Can this legal principle be used on Gmail too?

jasonsb• 8 months ago

Of course this principle applies to Gmail too, if you’re willing to accept the absurdity. I could copy-paste copyrighted NYT snippets into emails and send them to everyone I know. Under the same logic, the NYT would be entitled to have access to everyone's Gmail account in order to verify who's sending what and get compensated if anyone is infringing their copyright.

That’s not justice. That’s legal extortion.

I get that people are angry at OpenAI. But let’s not confuse outrage over one company with support for broken systems. Patent and copyright trolls thrive when we normalize overreach, whether it’s AI training data or email threads. If we let corporations weaponize IP law to control every digital whisper, we’re not protecting creators, we’re burying free expression under a mountain of lawsuits.

ripe• 8 months ago

That’s not justice. That’s legal extortion.

If you made it your business to publish a newsletter containing copied NYT articles, then wouldn't they have the right to go after you and discover your sent emails?

watwut3• 8 months ago

If you make a business out of that, then yes, it is copyright infringement and thus you can be sued. Are we supposed to be outraged over someone making a business out of newspaper articles they did not wrote being potentially sued?

Your example is not nearly an example of copyright troll or overreach.

secalex• 8 months ago

Gmail is an Electronic Communication Service as defined in 18 U.S.C § 2510, meaning its contents are protected under the Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C. Chapter 121 §§ 2701–2713).

Communications with an AI system do not involve a human so are not protected by ECPA or the SCA and get less protection. This is controversial and some people have called on ECPA/SCA to be extended to cover AI services. That means a warrant would be necessary to get your OpenAI history, not just a subpoena.

HPsquared4• 8 months ago

In a way it's like someone talking to themselves in the bathroom mirror. It's almost a higher privacy expectation than regular emails. You expect no human to see it at all.

pyrophane• 8 months ago

Wondering if anyone here has a good answer to this:

what protection does user data typically have during legal discovery in a civil suit like this where the defendant is a service provider but relevant evidence is likely present in user data?

Does a judge have to weigh a users' expectation of privacy against the request? Do terms of service come into play here (who actually owns the data? what privacy guarantees does the company make?).

I'm assuming in this case that the request itself isn't overly broad and seems like a legitimate use of the discovery process.

dangoodmanUT• 8 months ago

it is dramatically determined by the state and the judge

szczepano• 8 months ago

Each week, 800 million people use ChatGPT to think...

I think I have enough with the first sentence, no need to read more. The narration is clear, we are the brain and no one can stop us.

crmd• 8 months ago

your data belongs to you, just like our data about you belongs to us.

lingrush4• 8 months ago

I fully believe that OpenAI is essentially stealing the work of others by training their models on it without permission. However, giving a corporation infamous for promoting authoritarianism full access to millions of private conversations is not the answer.

OpenAI is right here. The NYT needs to prove their case another way.

marstall• 8 months ago

infamous for promoting authoritarianism

what are you referencing here?

crazygringo2• 8 months ago

giving a corporation infamous for promoting authoritarianism

The NYT is certainly open to criticism along many fronts, but I don't have the slightest idea what you mean in claiming it promotes authoritarianism.

jimbob45• 8 months ago

Well, the sponsors of the 1619 Project really don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to ethics.

msla• 8 months ago

It supports Trump by failing to report on his problems (such as ties to Epstein) while constantly attacking his enemies.

ibejoeb• 8 months ago

I'll bet you're right in some cases. I don't think that it is as pervasive as it has been made out to be though, but the argument requires some framing and current rules, regulation, and laws aren't tuned to make legal sense of this. (This is a little tangential, because the complaint seems to be about getting ChatGPT to reproduce content verbatim to a third party.)

There are two things I think about:

First, and generally, an AI ought to be able to ingest content like news articles because it's beneficial for users of AI. I would like to question an AI about current events.

Secondly, however, the legal mechanism by which it does that isn't clear. I think it would be helpful if these outlets would provide the information as long as the AI won't reproduce the content verbatim. If that does not happen, then another framing might liken the AI ingestion as an individual going to the library to read the paper. In that case, we don't require the individual to retroactively pay for the experience or unlearn what he may have learned while at the library.

freejazz17• 8 months ago

Well the court disagrees with you and found that this is evidence that the NYT needs to prove its case. No surprise, considering its direct evidence of exactly what OpenAI is claiming in its defense...

pessimizer• 8 months ago

I'm sorry, but we've made a lot of conversations illegal and pretended like that was all right. I'm sure we've made advising people how to dodge paywalls illegal as part of DMCA and/or some anti-hacking law, or some other garbage. I'm also sure that you run an automated service that will advise and has advised people on how to dodge paywalls. Even if there are exceptions for individuals giving advice to friends, or people giving advice for free, you are neither of those: you are a profit-making paid corporation that is automating this process which may be illegal. You may be a hacking endorser, a hacking advisor, and a hacking tool.

Under those circumstances, why wouldn't NYT have a case? I advise everybody who employs some sort of DRM or online system that limits access to ask for every chat that every one of these companies has ever had with anyone. Why are they the only people who get to break copyright and hacking laws? Why are they the only people who get to have private conversations?

I might also check if any LLMs have ever endorsed terrorist points of view (or banned political parties) during a chat, because even though those points of view may be correct (depending on the organization), endorsing them may be illegal and make you subject to sanctions or arrest. If people can't just speak, certainly corporate LLMs shouldn't be able to.

NoSalt2• 8 months ago

Another good reason to stay logged out when asking ChatGPT questions.

mmooss6• 8 months ago

It's common and trivial to identify you by other means.

NoSalt2• 8 months ago

Indeed, but one more step (staying logged out), absolutely cannot hurt, and can help.

ectospheno2• 8 months ago

Similar trains of thought:

I can’t fix global warming by myself so I’m going to do nothing.

Politicians don’t listen to my age group so I don’t vote.

I can’t donate to every charity so I won’t donate to any.

Everyone else ignores traffic laws so why should I care?

plorg• 8 months ago

As in every other dealing, OpenAI would have you believe they are so important that they are exempt from the legal discovery process.

buellerbueller3• 8 months ago

Standard tech scaling playbook, page 69420: there is a function f(x) whereby if you're growing fast enough, you can ignore the laws, then buy the regulators. This is called "The Uber Curve"

freejazz17• 8 months ago

OpenAI is so full of shit, this is incredible. There is a protective order and the logs are anonymized. Yet they would happily give this all to the gov't under a warrant. Incredibly self serving bs from them. The court ordered the production, I'm not sure what OpenAI is even trying to sell people exactly.

cowpig• 8 months ago

If there's one thing I've learned about Sam Altman it's that he's a shrewd political manipulator and every public move is in service of a hidden agenda[1]. What is it here?

- Is it part of a slow process of eroding public expectations of data privacy while blaming it on an external actor?

- Is it to undermine trust in traditional media, in an effort to increase dependence on AI companies as a source of truth?

- Is something else I'm not seeing?

I'm guessing it's all three of these?

[1] Those emails that came up in the suit with Elon Musk, followed by his eventual complete takeover of OpenAI, and the elaborate process of getting himself installed as chairman of the Reddit board to get the original founders back in control are prominent examples.

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

"The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private ChatGPT conversations."

As might any plaintiff. NYT might be the first of many others and the lawsuits may not be limited to copyright claims

Why has OpenAI collected and stored 20 million conversations (including "deleted chats")

What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations

By contrast the purpose of NYT's request is both clear and limited

The documents requested are not being made public by the plaintiffs. The documents will presumably be redacted to protect any confidential information before being produced to the plaintiffs, the documents can only be used by the plaintiffs for the purpose of the litigation against OpenAI and, unlike OpenAI who has collected and stored these conversations for as long as OpenAI desires, the plaintiffs are prohibited from retaining copies of the documents after the litigation is concluded

The privacy issue here has been created by OpenAI for their own commercial benefit

It is not even clear what this benefit, if any, will be as OpenAI continues to search for a "business model"

Wanton data collection

silveraxe93• 8 months ago

No it's not. It's literally a court order mandating them to collect this data.

- [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/openai-offers-20...

sailfast3• 8 months ago

This is an excellent article and source. Thank you.

otterley8• 8 months ago

This article says nothing of the sort. The court order is to preserve existing logs they already have, not to disable logging, and hand all the logs over the plaintiffs. OpenAI's objections are mainly that 1/there are too many logs (so they're proposing a sample instead) and that 2/there's identifying data in the logs and so they are being "forced" to anonymize the logs at their expense (even though it's what they want as a condition of transferring the logs).

There is nothing in the article that mentions OpenAI being forced to create new logs they don't already have.

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

NB. There is no order to "collect". The order is to preserve what is already being collected and stored in the ordinary course of business

https://ia801404.us.archive.org/31/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.6...

Aurornis5• 8 months ago

The two documents you linked are responses to specific parts of OpenAI's objection. They're not good sources for the original order.

Nevertheless, you're generally correct but you don't realize why: A core feature of ChatGPT is that it keeps your conversation history right there so you can click on it, review it, and continue conversations across all of your devices. The court order is to preserve what is already present in the system even if the user asks to delete it.

For those who are confused: A core feature of ChatGPT and other LLM accounts is that your past conversations are available to return to, until you specifically delete them. The problem now is that if a user asks for the conversation to be deleted, OpenAI has to retain the conversation for the court order even though it appears deleted.

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

Why does OpenAI collect and retain for 30 days^1 chats that the user wants to be deleted

It was doing this prior to being sued by the NYT and many others

OpenAI was collecting chats even when the user asked for deletion, i.e., the user did not want them saved

That's why a lawsuit could require OpenAi to issue a hold order, retain these chats for longer and produce them to another party in discovery

If OpenAI was not collecting these chats in the ordinary course of its business before being sued by the NYT and many others, then there would be no "deleted chats" for OpenAI to be compelled by court order to retain and produce to the plaintiffs

1. Or whatever period OpenAI decides on. It could change at any time for any reason. However OpenAI cannot change their retention policy to some shortened period after being sued. Google tried this a few years ago. It began destroying chats between employees after Google was on notice it was going to be sued by the US government and state AGs

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

Is it possible to install ChatGPT on only one computer ("device")

Is it a requirement that ChatGPT users own multiple computers

Is it a requirement that ChatGPT users use ChatGPT on multiple computers

Is it true that a goal of online advertising services providers is to learn about all of an ad targets' computers and link them to a single identity

Is every software "feature" necessary

Are there "features" in some software that benefit software developers more than software users, e.g., through data colllection, surveilllance and advertising services

Should all software "features" chosen by developers be "opt-out", with default settings chosen by developers not users, or should some be "opt-in"

What if a "feature" chosen by a developer that no user ever requested cannot be implemented as "opt-in". Should users that do not wish to subject themselves to the "feature" use the software

Is ChatGPT chat history a "feature"

macki0• 8 months ago

What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations

Its needed for the conversation history feature, a core feature of the ChatGPT product

Its like saying "What is the purpose of Google Photos storing millions of private images"

SilverElfin3• 8 months ago

This is true but why retain deleted conversations?

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

Is there a technical limitation that prevents chat histories from being stored locally on the user's computer instead of being stored on someone else's computer(s)

Why do chat histories need to be accessible by OpenAI, its service partners and anyone with the authority to request them from OpenAI

If users want this design, as suggested by HN commenters, if users want their chat histories to be accessible to OpenAI, its service providers and anyone with authority to request them from OpenAI, then wouldn't it also be true that these users are not much concerned with "privacy"

If so, then why would OpenAI proclaim they are "fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy", knowing that NYT is prohibited from making the logs public and users generally do not care much about "privacy" anyway

The restrictions on plaintiff NYT's use of the logs are greater than the restrictions, if any,^1 on OpenAI's use of them

1. If any such restrictions existed, for example if OpenAI stated "We don't do X" in a "privacy policy" and people interpreted this as a legally enforceable restriction,^2 how would a user verify that the statement was true, i.e., that OpenAI has not violated the "restriction". Silicon Valley companies like OpenAI are highly secretive

2. As opposed to a statement by OpenAi of what OpenAI allegedly does not do. Compare with a potentially legally-enforceable promise such as "OpenAI will not do X". Also consider that OpenAI may do Y, Z, etc. and make no mention of it to anyone. As it happens Silicon Valley companies generally have a reputation for dishonesty

Aurornis5• 8 months ago

Is there a technical limitation that prevents chat histories from being stored locally on the user's computer

People access ChatGPT through different interfaces: Web, desktop app, their phones, tablets.

Therefore the conversations are stored on the servers. It's really not some hidden plot against users to steal their data. It's just how most users expect their apps to work.

aDyslecticCrow• 8 months ago

They're very valuable data, and it's convenient to log in to see a previous chat.

If you have ever played with the api, its clear as day that the protocol itself is stateless.

neodymiumphish• 8 months ago

Presumably for cross-device interactivity. If I interact with ChatGPT on my phone, then open it on my desktop. I might be a bit frustrated that I can't get to the chat I was having on my phone previously.

OpenAI could store the chat conversation in an encrypted format that only you, the user, can decrypt, with the client-side determining the amount of previous messages to include for additional context, but there's plenty of user overhead involved in an undertaking like that (likely a separate decryption password would be needed to ensure full user-exclusive access, etc).

I'd appreciate and use a feature like that, but I doubt most "average" users would care.

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

If I am sending HTTP POST requests using own choice of software via the command line to some website, e.g., an OpenAI server, then I can save those requests on local storage. I can keep a record of what I have done. This history does not need to be saved by OpenAI and consequently end up being included in a document production when (not if) OpenAI is sued. But I cannot control what OpenAI does, that's their decision

For example, I save all the POST request bodies I send over the internet in the local forward proxy's log. I add logs to tarballs and compress with an algorithm that allows for searching the logs in the tarballs without decompressing them

It does not matter what "reason" or "excuse" or "explanation" anyone presents, technical or otherwise, for why OpenAi does what it does

The issue is what are the consequences

Aurornis5• 8 months ago

What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations

Your previous ChatGPT conversations show up right in the ChatGPT interface.

They have to store the private conversations to enable users to bring them up in the interface.

This isn't a secretive, hidden data collection. It's a clear and obvious feature right in the product. They're fighting for the ability to not retain secret records of past conversations that have been deleted.

The problem with the court order is that it requires them to keep the conversations even after a user presses the 'Delete' button on them.

baobun• 8 months ago

They could have been stored at the client, and encrypted before optionally synced back to OpenAI servers in a way that the stored chats can only be read back by the user. Signal illustrates how this is possible.

OpenAI made a choice in how the feature was and is implemented.

cush5• 8 months ago

What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations

Have you used ChatGPT? Your conversation history is on the left rail

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

"Have you used ChatGPT?"

Large number of upvotes on the quoted comment however. Maybe some of those voters are ChatGPT users

I do searching from the command line in text mode. The script I use keeps a "log" (a customised SERP) of all query strings and search result URLs. I also have these URLs stored in the logs from the forward proxy. These are compressed using RePair. I can search the compressed logs faster this way than with something like

    ztsd -dc log.zst|grep pattern

    rg -z pattern log.zst

stefan_2• 8 months ago

They made the feature, now they get to live with it. So they can spare us the feigned surprise and outrage.

Instead of writing open letters they could of course do something about it. Even Google stopped storing your location timeline on their servers and now have it per-device only.

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

Using RePair for compression I can also search inside compressed tarballs full of logs

To do this, I first insert a blank line at the top of each log file before adding to the tarball

IME, RePair is faster than compressing with zstd and the size reduction is almost the same

The only "catch" is that RePair requires more memory during compression

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

I read in the pleadings that OpenAI claims it cannot search its logs without decompressing them first

I can search the logs I keep without decompressing

Every user is different and each is free to use whatever software they want

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

As requested

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45708542

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45708573

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

If an analogy to the history of search engines can be made,^1 then we know that log retention policies in the US can change over time. The user has no control over such changes

https://ide.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/w23815.pdf

Companies operating popular www search engines might claim that the need for longer retention is "to provide better service" or some similar reason that focuses on users' interests rather than the company's interests^2

2. Generally, advertising services

This paper attempts to expose such claims as bogus

1. According to some reports OpenAI is sending some queries to Google

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

Amusingly, this discussion thread is filled with replies that attempt to "answer" the question of "why" OpenAI collects chat histories even when it must have known it would be sued for copyright infringment

For users affected by OpenAI's conduct, an "answer" makes no difference. Anyone can construct any "answer" they want and we can see that in this thread. For users affected by OpenAI's conduct, it does not matter

In the above paper on search engines, the claim was that longer retention of sensitive data leads to better search. This was the "answer" presented in response to the question of "why"

But the "answer" is only misdirection. The companies have no reputation for being honest and their operations are non-transparent. Accordingly, user focus will be on the consequences for users of the company's practices, not "why"

Some readers are probably too young to have read through the AOL search data

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release

Did anyone care "why" AOL released the data

IMHO, it is unfortunate that papers like the one above need to published

The question of "why" is rhetorical. It is meant to the draw attention to the consequences for users, not to seek an "answer"

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

News Plaintiffs October 15, 2025 Letter Motion to Compel

https://ia801205.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.61...

OpenAI October 30, 2025 Letter Opposing Motion to Compel

https://ia601205.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.61...

November 7, 2025 Order on Motion to Compel

https://ia601205.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.61...

"OpenAI has failed to explain how its consumers privacy rights are not adequately protected by: (1) the existing protective order in this multidistrict litigation or (2) OpenAIs exhaustive de-identification of all of the 20 million Consumer ChatGPT Logs.1

1. As News Plaintiffs point out, OpenAI has spent the last two and a half months processing and deidentifying this 20 million record sample. (ECF 719 at 1 n.1)."

tzs• 8 months ago

The documents requested are not being made public by the plaintiffs

In fact, as far as I understand it, they could not be made public by the plaintiffs even if they wanted to do so, or even if one of their employees decided to leak them.

That's because the plaintiffs themselves never actually see the documents. They will only be seen by the plaintiff's lawyers and any experts hired by those lawyers to analyze them.

pkilgore2• 8 months ago

You are correct. I've operated under many protective orders that require me to redact portions of reports clients paid for because they were not authorized to see those specific parts due to the order.

amypetrik8• 8 months ago

Why has OpenAI collected and stored 20 million conversations (including "deleted chats")

To train the AI further. Obviously. Simple as.

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

"Fighting the New York Times' lawyers' and experts' invasion of user privacy"

1vuio0pswjnm716• 8 months ago

Instead of asking, "What is the purpose of OpenAI storing milllions of private conversations" and having HN commenters (mis)interpret this as something other than a rhetorical question, one could ask, "What are the consequences for users of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations that users do not wish to save"

HN replies might try to answer this as well but the answer is already known to the world

The conversations will be made available to the plaintiffs' (including New York Times') attorneys and the plaintiffs' attorneys' experts

If OpenAI did not store such conversations as a matter of practice before being sued, then there would be no private conversations to make available to the plaintiffs' attorneys and their experts

275 upvotes

AFAICT, most HN readers did _not_ misintepret the question

HN replies != HN, it is a small subset of the readership

JCM93• 8 months ago

This is BS. It’s like saying “We robbed a jewelry store and sold the jewelry. Now the police are poking around to see if anyone is wearing the jewelry we stole. Blasphemy! But don’t worry we will protect your privacy!”

Of course the Times wants more evidence that the content OpenAI allegedly stole is ending in things OpenAI is selling.

AlienRobot3• 8 months ago

It's more like a torrent tracker telling users that a newspaper wants to know what people are torrenting because they "claim" people are torrenting the newspaper, but investigating this would be an invasion of privacy of the users of the torrent tracker.

This isn't even a hyperbole. It's literally the same thing.

freejazz17• 8 months ago

No, it's not. OpenAI is a commercial enterprise selling the stolen data.

AlienRobot3• 8 months ago

They claim they might find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall.

Is this a joke? We all know people do this. There is no "might" in it. They WILL find it.

OpenAI is trying to make it look like this is a breach of user's privacy, when the reality is that it's operating like a pirate website and if it were investigated that would become proven.

prmoustache• 8 months ago

Always funny to see this kind of article behind a cookie banner. So much hypocrisy.

sailfast3• 8 months ago

20M seems like a low number and I’m guessing they all used citations or similar content somewhere on the back-end that would map to NYTimes content as a result of a legal discovery request.

Also down to 20M from 120M per court order.

Sorry, but this seems a completely reasonable standard for discovery to me given the total lack of privacy on the platform - especially for free users.

Also sorry it probably means you’re going to owe a lot of money to the Times.

sailfast3• 8 months ago

It’s a mystery to me why companies that know they’re pushing a line of fair use or regulation are suddenly “surprised” when they get sued.

They could’ve asked permission. They could have worked with content providers instead of scraping. But they didn’t - and they knew what could happen.

FA (with fair use boundaries) and FO

outside12343• 8 months ago

Dude, you stole all of their articles to train your AI. Of course they want discovery.

Man, the sooner this company goes bankrupt the better.

etchalon3• 8 months ago

This is so transparently disingenuous and weird.

otterley8• 8 months ago

From the FAQ:

Q: Is the NYT obligated to keep this data private?
A: Yes. The Times would be legally obligated at this time to not make any data public outside the court process.

The NY Times has built over a century a reputation for fiercely protecting its confidential sources. Why are they somehow less trustworthy than OpenAI is?

If the NY Times leaked the customer information to a third party, they'd be in contempt of court. On the other hand, OpenAI is bound only by their terms of service with its customers, which they can modify as they please.

mmooss6• 8 months ago

I generally agree, but publicizing the data is only a small part of the risk. The NYT could use the data for journalism research, then perform parallel construction of it for the public news article:

For example, if they find Mayor X asking ChatGPT about fraud, porn, DUI, cancer diagnoses, murder, etc. - maybe even mentioning names, places, etc. - they could then investigate that issue, find other evidence, and publish that.

otterley8• 8 months ago

First, the logs are supposed to be anonymized before being sent over. Second, the court can order the company's lawyers to "firewall" the logs from the newsroom so that their journalists can't get access to it, under penalty of contempt and potential disbarment.

wkat42424• 8 months ago

If OpenAI hadn't used data from the NYT without permission in the first place this wouldn't have happened. That is the root cause of all this.

I'm glad the NYT is fighting them. They've infringed the rights of almost every news outlet but someone has to bring this case.

johnwheeler2• 8 months ago

Exactly. And the OpenAI corporates speak acting like they give a shit about our best interests. Give me a break, Sam Altman. How stupid do you think everyone is?

They have proven that they are the most untrustworthy company on the planet

And this isn't AI fear speaking. This is me raging at Sam Altman for spreading so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt just to get investments. The rest of us have to suffer for the last two years, worrying about losing our jobs, only to find out the AGI lie is complete bullsh*t.

NewsaHackO3• 8 months ago

To me, no company has the customers’ best interests in mind. This whole thing is akin to when Apple was refusing to unlock phones for the FBI. Of course, Apple profits by having people think that they take privacy seriously, and they demonstrate it by protecting users’ privacy. Same thing here; OpenAI needs chats to have some expectation of privacy, especially because a large use case of AI is personal advice on things. So they are fighting to make sure it's true.

code_for_monkey• 8 months ago

You got downvoted for this? That many people are doing 'Leave Sam Altman alone!'? kinda wild

terminalshort10• 8 months ago

They infringed nothing. Two judges have already ruled that training on copyrighted data is fair use https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/two-california-distr...

JCM93• 8 months ago

The issue is, in part, a concern that ChatGPT responses are often just simple derivations of the original content in ways that wouldn’t be considered fair use.

NewJazz• 8 months ago

But displaying regurgitations of very similar content may not be fair use. Fair use is a very delicate affair. One factor is whether the modified work poses as a market replacement for the original work.

zeofig• 8 months ago

Two idiot judges.

t0lo• 8 months ago

[flagged]

freejazz17• 8 months ago

Damn, you'd think OpenAI would have made this argument! Maybe there's something you're missing if this didn't save the day for them.

protocolture2• 8 months ago

People pretending to own Data that should belong to the commons is the larger issue.

stackedinserter3• 8 months ago

WTF with all these comments. Regardless on OpenAI reputation and practices, I don't want NYT or anyone else to see my conversations, I completely agree to OpenAI here.

buellerbueller3• 8 months ago

I don't want NYT or anyone else to see my conversations

Except for OpenAI, apparently.

stackedinserter3• 8 months ago

Obviously for OpenAI, because they providing the service. Same for my doctor, my pharmacist and my lawyer. What was your point?

brandonmenc• 8 months ago

Agree. Everyone would be singing a different tune if say, Fox News were asking for this.

stackedinserter3• 8 months ago

Yeah, it will be funny to see people turn 180, Fox should do that just for teh lulz.

micromacrofoot• 8 months ago

"they're invading your privacy by requesting access to our invasion of your privacy!"

lazyeye• 8 months ago

The NYT used to market itself to advertisers with the observation that "our readers have the highest disposable income of any paper in the US".

It gives an interesting insight into politics and the modern Democrat party that the newspaper of the wealthy leans so strongly left. This was even before Trump came to power.

bigbuppo• 8 months ago

If the information is really that sensitive, why did they keep it in the first place?

mmooss6• 8 months ago

One reason that people make cynical, deceptive claims is that it doesn't impact their credibility later. The next thing they say, people don't respond, 'well you deceived us last time'; when the honest person says something, others don't give them much credibility.

That little bit of morality - truth, honesty, integrity, etc. - is essential to a functioning society that leans toward good outcomes. (Often it seems that many just assume we'll get good outcomes, not that they must work hard to make it happen.)

theoldgreybeard• 8 months ago

"Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point."

Can I just say that everyone sucks here and I hope they both lose somehow?

infamouscow• 8 months ago

The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private ChatGPT conversations. They claim they might find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall.

Let me rewrite this without propaganda:

Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lawyers, we couldn't persuade the judge that our malfeasance should be kept from the light of day.

zkmon• 8 months ago

If OpenAI has to get to this level of pitch, herding its users against their opponent in a legal case, I think they have already lost the battle and reputation. What are they expecting users to do? Revolt against the courts and newspapers?

paxys• 8 months ago

So much talk about privacy and how this is my private data that the NYT has no right to access.

If this is truly my data then it should be okay for me to download it and train my own model on it right?

Nope, that would explicitly be disallowed under the terms OpenAI has made me sign and they would ban my account and maybe even sue me for it.

So yeah, they are full of shit.

visiondude• 8 months ago

“NYTimes fights blatant and obvious copyright infringement with legal processes to assess damage” - another angle.

iammjm• 8 months ago

That's an absolutely disgusting framing by openai. This really is about openai stealing.

The-Ludwig• 8 months ago

Please correct me if I am wrong, but couldn't OpenAi just encrypt every conversation before saving them? With each query to the model the full conversation is fed into the model again, so I guess there is no technical need to store them unencrypted. Unless, of course, OpenAi wants to analyze the chats.

The way I see it, the problem is that OpenAI employees can look at the chats and the fact that some NYT lawyer can look at it doesn't make me more uncomfortable. Insane argumentation. It's like saying an investigator with a court-order should not be allowed to look at stored copies of letters, although the company sending those letters a) looks at them regularly b) stores these copies in the first place.

nielsole• 8 months ago

Encryption that you have the keys to won't save you from a court order

RugnirViking• 8 months ago

what about encryption only the users have the keys to? I'm assuming thats what parent meant

NewsaHackO3• 8 months ago

With each query to the model the full conversation is fed into the model again, so I guess there is no technical need to store them unencrypted.

I am pretty sure this isn't true. They have to have some sort of K-V cache system to make continuing conversations cheaper.

hedayet• 8 months ago

If it's about* proving that people are getting around the paywall with OpenAI, won't it be much easier to prove this with a live reproduction in the court?

* I am not too familiar with this matter and hence definitely am not rooting for one party or another. Asking this just out of technical curiosity.

o11c2• 8 months ago

No, because OpenAI can change their server at any time - and does, to patch over the cases where their copyright infringement is obvious.

focusgroup0• 8 months ago

psychopath Scam Altman does not give a rat's behind about your "privacy"; he is merely trying to keep the grift going and avoid responsibility for his unethical behavior (see also: Scarlett Johanssen's voice)

singleshot_• 8 months ago

"The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private ChatGPT conversations."

Private? Aren’t they stored in a third party server, subject to OpenAI terms of service and all sorts of relevant laws?

BrenBarn• 8 months ago

What a joke. It's like burglarizing someone's house and then calling the cops when someone else takes your ill-gotten gains.

jp57• 8 months ago

Wish they'd give a bulk delete interface that lets me choose which chats to keep and which to delete. (i.e. not "Delete All" scorched earth).

fpauser• 8 months ago

"[..] Trust, security, and privacy guide every product and decision we make. [..]"

L O L

jrockway3• 8 months ago

I've noticed a pattern of companies writing their customers open letters asking them to do their contract negotiations for them. First it was ESPN vs. YouTube (not watching MNF this week was the best 3 hours I've ever saved, sorry advertisers). Now it's OpenAI vs. The New York Times.

Little do they know that I care very little for either party and enjoy seeing both of them squirm. You went to business school, not me. Work it out.

In this case, it's awfully suspicious that OpenAI is worried about The New York Times finding literal passages in their articles that ChatGPT spits out verbatim. If your AI doesn't do that, like you say, then why would it be a problem to check?

Finally, both parties should find a neutral third party. The neutral third party gets the full text of every NYT article and ChatGPT transcript, and finds the matches. NYT doesn't get ChatGPT transcripts. OpenAI doesn't get the full text of every NYT article (even though they have to already have that). Everyone is happy. If OpenAI did something illegal, the court can find out. If they didn't, then they're safe. I think it would be very fair.

(I take the side of neither party. I'm not a huge fan of training language models on content that wasn't licensed for that purpose. And I'm not a huge fan of The NYT's slide to the right as they cheerlead the end of the American experiment.)

themafia2• 8 months ago

Finally, both parties should find a neutral third party.

That's next to impossible. And if that party fails to be neutral you've just generated a new lawsuit entangled with this one.

The current procedure is each side gets their own expert. The two expert can duke it out and the crucible of the courtroom decides who was more credible.

jrockway3• 8 months ago

That's fair. I understand why OpenAI wouldn't want to give anyone transcripts (as a user, I frankly wouldn't even want OpenAI to keep my transcripts), and I understand why the NYT doesn't want to give OpenAI all their articles.

Maybe the NYT needs to bloom-filter-ify their articles in 10 word chunks (or something, I don't know enough about linguistics to tell you what's unique enough for copyright infringement or to prove "copying"), have OpenAI search transcripts, and turn over the matches. That limits the scope of the search dramatically, but is still invasive.

baggachipz• 8 months ago

Two orgs helmed by supporters of authoritarianism (to put it nicely):

let them fight.

jrockway3• 8 months ago

Yup, well said. Companies want me to have an emotional investment in them. I don't.

duxup• 8 months ago

"We stored all kinds of data about you! Someone ELSE having it is bad!"

-OpenAI

Hard to be sympathetic with OpenAI here.

d--b• 8 months ago

The nerve!!!

That on top of every lie they told, every value they betrayed, every line they crossed, they still have the nerve to blog about being the good guy!

poolnoodle• 8 months ago

What a lousy attempt at flipping the narrative.

einrealist• 8 months ago

Each prompt is a potential confession.

internetguy• 8 months ago

LMAO How ironic...

vmh1928• 8 months ago

"we built a tool using other people's copyrighted content and now they're suing us and want to know how much use the customers of our "other people's content" tool made of the copyrighted content we used to train the model. Thank you for your attention and outrage over this matter."

sam-cop-vimes• 8 months ago

It's a bit rich for openai to claim they are protecting user data from journalists. Laughable, at best.

stevage3• 8 months ago

As soon as I see someone claiming a lawsuit against them is "baseless" I'm deeply sceptical about everything that follows.

rpdillon19• 8 months ago

When I looked for the base of this lawsuit, I was looking for some kind of monetary damage that the New York Times had suffered as a result of open AI's actions, like specific cases where their work has been reproduced or people canceling their subscriptions to the New York Times because of OpenAI's launch. I've done so much reading, and I've still been unable to find anything that articulates this. Do you know of anything that talks about it?

stevage3• 8 months ago

specific cases where their work has been reproduced

Isn't that exactly what they're trying to find by looking through OpenAI customers' conversations?

nixpulvis• 8 months ago

I mean, I hate that our lives are becoming consistently more and more surveilled, but this doesn't shock me. I've assumed my Google search history is accessible, despite not even being logged in. Of course they are saving conversation. Even if they said they weren't I wouldn't believe it. It's fucking sad, but that's the reality.

I wish I had a solution, so we could all feel a sense of freedom and pressure lifted from our thoughts and actions. But I only see this getting worse.

So am I upset that the NYT's lawyers want access to the records... a little. It's an invasion of privacy. But I'm more upset that they have anything to dig through to begin with.

If only we could see how things within all these companies we are forced to trust actually work. If only OpenAI was actually open. When will we all learn to demand open source, open platform services. Capitalize the development, and capitalize the infrastructure, but leave the process and operations out in the open so users can make informed decisions again. Normalize it like how homes are normally inspected before being purchased.

phendrenad22• 8 months ago

This would allow them to access millions of user conversations that are unrelated to the case

What I don't understand is why they can't have a third party handle the data. Why does the NYT need it itself?

fguerraz• 8 months ago

OpenAI created this problem all by themselves. If the intention for private chats is that they should be private, then they should be e2e encrypted.

Rafuino• 8 months ago

LOL they think they can win with the privacy angle? They've scraped the entire internet, including what is likely incredibly private and personal information, and they also log everything you do on the service. Get outta heah

Ms-J• 8 months ago

ClosedAI vacuums up and hoards all of your private chats to do terrible things and now complains when they must hand over your precious data without them receiving their cut.

This is funny!

zaptheimpaler• 8 months ago

These are the same scumbags that scraped the entire internet including copyrighted books and private code without any regard for legality or ownership, now trying to spin them being sued for theft as a privacy issue.

zahma• 8 months ago

Apparently OpenAI has zero interest in private user data. I have a hard time understanding how they’ll deploy this defense of “what about private user data?” in court.

Frieren• 8 months ago

Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

OpenAI is lying about why they are doing this. They want the public to attack the New York Times because OpenAI probably broke the law in so many ways...

If they cared about privacy they would no training their models on that same private data. But here we are.

We need very strong regulations to rule in all these tech companies and make them work for their users instead of working against them and lying about it.

shevy-java• 8 months ago

They all want our data. Greedy organisations.

Havoc• 8 months ago

This feels somewhat slimy as a PR piece but the message is valid. Letting NYT trawl through a bunch of private chats on suspicion just to check if there was some vague wrongdoing in the form of paywall bypass seems ridiculous

Chats contain way too much sensitive private data to subject them to bulk fishing expeditions

this15testingg• 8 months ago

the constant hypocrisy is unbearable. these people having so much power is holding humanity back.

meV1• 8 months ago

It ridiculous for OpenAI to attempt to claim some moral high-ground here. They're a company that has demonstrated zero respect for the copyright or data privacy regulations of other organisations. I think they take users dignity and rights with a grain of salt.

Their statements are all aspirational, "we're working toward de-identifying" etc. They've built one of the most powerful AIs ever seen and now they're claiming it's difficult to delete, de-identify / anonymize. Maybe they should ask their AI to do it :-)

It's impossible to take this company seriously. They're nothing but a carny barker stealing everything of value that they can lay their (creepy) hands on.

perplex3d• 8 months ago

The “aspirational” language is what really stood out to me as well. “We’re building our privacy and security protections to match the responsibility” and “we are accelerating our security and privacy roadmap” and “our long term roadmap includes advanced security features designed to keep your data private, including client-side encryption” (what does this have to do with what OpenAI stores server-side?) and “we will build.” If OpenAI cared that much, then the privacy and security protections should be baked in rather than “tacked on.” Their statement makes me feel even less optimistic in their abilities to protect information.

cestith2• 8 months ago

Welcome to discovery. It’s what happens when you get sued.

Meanwhile, OpenAI talking about invading privacy sounds an awful lot like a claim with unclean hands.

tritip• 8 months ago

A very Musky attempt to win popular support.

leumon• 8 months ago

This problem wouldn't exist if openai wouldn't store chatlogs (which of course they want to do, so that they can train on that data to improve the models). But calling nyt the bad guy here is simply wrong because it's not strictly necessary to store that data at all, and if you do, there will always be a risk of others getting access to it.

manchicken• 8 months ago

Privacy for me but not for thee

cbondurant• 8 months ago

This is rich coming from the company that scraped the entire internet and tons of pirated books and scientific papers to train their models.

Maybe if you didn't scrape every single site on the internet they wouldn't have a basis for their case that you've stolen all of their articles through training your models on them. If anyone is to blame for this its openAI, not the NYT.

Play stupid games win stupid prizes.

pkilgore2• 8 months ago

If you do anything in America that results in a stored record it's possible it will be released in discovery and a lawyer will read it. This happens all the time, and has happened for hundreds years.

It's not like the NYT will be published this shit in the news. Their lawyers and experts will have access to make a legal case, under a protective order. I'm not going to lose my law license because I'm doing doc review and you asked it something naughty and I think it's funny.

Courts and lawyers deal with this stuff all the time. What's very very weird to me is how upset OpenAI is about it.

They look like they are hiding something.

cyrusradfar• 8 months ago

The request is for redacted logs. Redaction must be reasonable but OpenAI can protect the PII across 20M conversations if they:

  1. search conversations for PII they know of for the given user and redact

  2. use their own models to scrub the conversations of non-verbatim mentions

In the end, the NYT isn't asking for the identity of the posters. If that was the case, I'd 100% be onboard to scream bloody murder with 'em.

Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

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