A court ruling permits OpenAI to cease keeping ChatGPT chats, which were previously required by a preservation order from a New York Times case. OpenAI will continue to keep an eye on flagged accounts for certain situations even though it will not need to keep user data.
A recent court judgment allows OpenAI to cease storing all user talks using ChatGPT. The New York Times and other news publishers launched a lawsuit against the AI business, claiming that it was required to preserve all of its chatbot chats due to a “preservation order.”
According to Ars Technica, US Magistrate Judge Ona Wang recently granted a combined request by OpenAI and the news outlets to lift the preservation order.
The need to “preserve and segregate any output log data that would otherwise be erased on a continuing forward basis” will no longer apply to OpenAI.
All temporary and even deleted conversations recorded under the preservation order will be accessible to news organizations until September 26th.
According to reports, OpenAI will also continue to monitor some ChatGPT accounts and save temporary and deleted conversations of any users that the news organizations alerted after they started examining the data.
What has transpired so far between OpenAI and journalistic organizations?
The New York Times and other news outlets sued OpenAI and its largest supporter, Microsoft, in December 2023, claiming that they had trained their AI models on its copyrighted content.
Although OpenAI expressed privacy concerns and attempted to counter what it saw as the NYT’s effort at “mass surveillance” of ChatGPT user data, it was unable to persuade the court to protect user data.
A US Magistrate Judge mandated that OpenAI save all ChatGPT conversations—deleted, temporary, and regular—forever.
According to the Times, these logs would demonstrate that ChatGPT was trained on its copyrighted articles and that the AI’s output was an exact or nearly exact replica of one of the articles’ contents.
OpenAI has often used the “fair use” concept in response to news organizations’ copyright concerns, asserting that it has the right to utilize restricted, unauthorized use of copyrighted content for criticism and study.