OpenAI Accidentally Erases ChatGPT Training Findings Amidst Copyright Legal Battle

The New York Times and Daily News have sued OpenAI and its investor Microsoft over suspicions that ChatGPT was trained on their copyrighted works. Last week, it turns out, the lawyers’ research into the training data was erased by OpenAI engineers, presumably by accident. Lawyers for The Times and Daily News say a significant amount of their compiled evidence against OpenAI has been irretrievably deleted; OpenAI said it could recover some of it but only in non-admissible form. The deletions are a severe setback to two lawsuits that accuse ChatGPT of being trained with massive amounts of copyrighted material.