New York Times claims OpenAI deleted evidence in copyright lawsuit

In new filings by The New York Times in its ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI, the publication has alleged that the AI firm accidentally deleted potential evidence that its legal team had spent more than 150 hours collecting. 

The filing said that while OpenAI managed to recover most of the data, the folder structure and file names could not be recovered. The retrieved data cannot be "used to determine where the news plaintiffs' copied articles" into their training datasets for the AI model. 

Jason Deutrom, spokesperson for OpenAI, told Wired the company disagrees "with the characterizations made" and will file its response soon. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December last year, alleging that the AI firm had used its articles to train AI models.

The lawsuit said that millions of articles published by The New York Times were used to train automated chatbots "that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information." The suit says that the companies should be accountable for "billions of dollars" for the "unlawful copying and use of The Times' uniquely valuable works."