Reimagining Conversational AI: OpenAI's Response to the NYT Lawsuit

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1:23So today on the podcast, I'm going to be talking about what exactly is going on with this lawsuit and what the implications are for the industry. So let's dive into it. So this all comes back to the New York Times because recently they amended their terms of service to prevent AI companies from mining its articles and images to essentially enhance AI models. Now there's buzz that the media giant might be gearing up to bring some legal action against OpenAI. So this is a move that, you know, if successful, could severely impact OpenAI's operations, including potentially dismantling the data set of ChatGPT and incurring fines of as much as$150 for every infringing piece of content, right?

2:05This would be a very big deal. There's a ton of content on there, and they could probably prove millions and millions of dollars of content that is infringing, right if this is if this is the course to go so sources with some firsthand knowledge informed npr recently that the new york times legal team is considering if litigation is the right step to safeguard the intellectual property of their content from their journal of course so at the time um that this conversation was going on both open ai and the times hadn't responded to a bunch of different people have been requesting for them to make comments on this and neither of them They're both being very tight-lipped and not responding to any journalists' questions on this issue.

2:46So if the New York Times does take legal action against OpenAI, it could mark one of the most significant copyright litigations since the very successful release of Chatshubiti. So this development kind of comes on the heels of figures like Sarah Silverman and other authors that are trying to pursue legal avenues against OpenAI, aiming to protect their literary copyrights. um however i will say that chat gpt isn't alone right ai platforms um facing these challenges are very numerous there's tons of ai platforms and all of them have used similar strategies so essentially all of them would be wrapped up in these kinds of issues so earlier this year experts indicated um that the image generating tool stable diffusion might be on shaky grounds due to similar copyright issues and open ai seems to be really you know you could say it's squarely in the crosshairs of a lot of these early legal endeavors.

3:41So if the Times can really convincingly argue copyright infringement, OpenAI might find itself reconfiguring ChatGPT's entire data set to consist solely of explicitly approved content. So I think this would be a significant setback for the company, especially in light of recent reports by the Washington Post about, you know, allegedly, right, they're losing some users. And I mean, this is nothing too shocking. There was a massive hype at the beginning everyone had to try it once a lot of people may not have found a use case for it and moved on or they just tried getting it to do a funny joke it's like you know when siri first came out and everyone was probably had really high usage of siri everyone was asking it where to bury a dead body and all sorts of morbid questions that went viral um and you know eventually the the silly questions and hype moved past and people just use siri for whatever people use siri for actually that's not probably the greatest comparison either because siri i think is way, did not reach its full potential in any means, right?

4:38But in any case, I think that, you know, a lot of people have some growing skepticism towards AI's transformative potential, but there's also a lot of people that are incredibly optimistic about it. So there's definitely two sides of every coin there. But while many authors are primarily seeking the flexibility to exclude their works from OpenAI's data set, the Times has some additional apprehension. So a leading worry, as highlighted by NPR, is that platforms like ChatGPT could leverage the Times content to evolve into directly being a competitor and potentially synthesizing articles based on the original investigation and, you know, the journalistic efforts of the newspaper's team.

5:20So the recent TOS change by the Times, which now bans the use of its content for AI-related endeavors, seems to offer the media entity an additional shield. There have been indications of the Times maybe rethinking a licensing arrangement with OpenAI, which would have, you know, mandated compensation for New York Times content used in AI model training. However, NPR has reported tension in meetings between the two parties, casting doubts over, you know, really the viability of that deal, essentially considering the competitive potential for the result or for the product that could be created. So, you know, I think this is interesting.

5:58I think that licensing is the way to go. I think OpenAI paying some sort of licensing fee to the platforms that they scrape content from just makes sense. Grabbing it for free seems a little bit of a, you know, renegade cowboy move that maybe flies for the first few iterations of the beginning. But as you become a little bit, you know, very well funded and become a serious company, if you're grabbing people's data, scraping it for free seems like a questionable practice that's going to just end in possible lawsuits. So I think OpenAI should just pay licensing. I know that would be exorbitantly expensive, but I mean, it is the data from a platform, so that makes sense to me.

6:35However, what they're hinting at here is that they may, you know, companies like the New York Times may not even want to let them pay licensing because they're like, oh man, you're just going to make a competitor that can write news articles for us to synthesize our news articles and we don't want our journalists to get replaced, yada, yada. Of course, this thing isn't actually going to replace investigative journalists who have to like go and make phone calls to companies and try to go network with whistleblowers to, you know, leak important financial documents about frauds and scams. And like, there's all sorts of things that this AI is not going to go do, you know, get the trust of an employee at a company so that they'll tell you some sort of inside piece of information that's really pertinent to an investigation or report you're working on, right?

7:16Like there's all sorts of things these AIs are not going to do that humans will be needed for. And I think that people are really barking up the wrong tree when they're like oh no we don't want to give you know chat gpt access to the new york times data set because then it's going to just like learn how to be a journalist it's like yeah there's a thousand other journals and guess what every single like journal has authors and you can just go to those individual authors and get them to contribute like their individual works um if you wanted it to learn to be a journalist so i think it would be ridiculous if the new york times didn't you know if like they were offered a licensing deal and they said no because we don't want you to you know train to be a journalist or replace our jobs that's ridiculous that's that's like obviously it's gonna get done with or without them so i think that would be ridiculous i think they should just take the money um and appreciate being included in the data set and making some money from it um because ultimately uh journalists are needed for a lot of the investigative work but for like the literally putting the words together of the investigation definitely an ai can do that like and it can do it probably better and faster eventually so i don't see why i mean i know some people are like sad about the craft of writing going that direction.

8:21I get it, right? There's definitely that side of it. I have lots of people in my family that are English majors and whatnot and into creative writing and all that kind of stuff. But in any case, it's just the way it is. So like it or hate it, that's where it's going. The AI is going to do a better job. But I think this is an incredible opportunity for journalists to go get a whole bunch of really impressive pieces of information and reports, go get gather quotes, throw them all into a big soup, spit it to an AI and say, hey, turn this into a coherent, nice article, right? I gathered all the data.

8:48I did all the work, spit it out. You could get some incredible articles written very timely. You could break reports and news very fast. I think that this is probably where this should go. But in any case, one thing I will say that is interesting, right? Because everyone's like, oh no, the New York Times is going to sue them for like$150 ,000 for every piece of infringing content. They're going to have to redo the whole chat GPT. Well, guess what? They are redoing all of chat GPT. They're about to train GPT-5. They're getting everything set up for it. They've just trademarked the name. For all intents and purposes, we can assume that GPT-5 is probably coming out in December.

9:19We've heard a lot of hints. It's going to be really incredible. But guess what? If the New York Times files a lawsuit before then, they just exclude it from the data set of the next training model. And by the time all the litigations and lawsuits are done and New York Times says, ha, we're going to win and you got to pay us for every infringing thing. They're like, okay, great. Guess what? We've already trained GPT-5. So pretty much OpenEye just has to drag it out into a legal battle that takes till December, at which point they can say, okay, fine, you win. We're not going to use, assuming they don't go for damages.

9:50And I'm sure they'll have all sorts of stipulations, but they'll say, you're fine, you win. We'll pull you out of the data set. And if you don't want to strike a licensing deal, you just don't get money. Other journalists will strike licensing deals and they probably will get paid. So overall, I don't think this is a huge threat or existential worry, but I do think this does shift how open AI has to behave and how a lot of these other AI models have to behave. I think it's going to be more pay for the data. And I think also these journalists need to kind of shift their perception so that they're not so concerned about this AI taking their job and learn to work with it.