On December 27, 2023, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on the grounds that the corporate committed intentional copyright infringement through its generative AI tool ChatGPT. The Times alleged each that ChatGPT was improperly trained using large amounts of text from its articles and that ChatGPT's output contained language lifted directly from its articles.
To treatment the situation, the Times asked for greater than just money: It asked a federal court to order the “destruction” of ChatGPT.
If this request is granted, OpenAI could be forced to delete its trained large language models similar to GPT-4 in addition to its training data, stopping the corporate from rebuilding its technology.
This prospect is alarming for the 100 million people who use ChatGPT every week. And it raises two questions that interest me Law professor. First, can a federal court actually order the destruction of ChatGPT? And second, if it may do that, will it do that?
Destruction in court
The answer to the primary query is yes. Under Copyright lawCourts have the facility to issue destruction orders.
To understand why, take into consideration records. Her growing popularity again has attracted Counterfeiters who sell pirated records.
If a record label sues a counterfeiter for copyright infringement and wins, what happens to the counterfeiter's inventory? What happens to the master and stamp plates used to mass produce the counterfeits, and to the machines used to make these plates in the primary place?
To answer these questions, copyright law grants courts the facility to destroy infringing goods and the equipment used to supply them. From a legal perspective, there isn’t a legal use for a pirated record. There can also be no legitimate reason for a counterfeiter to maintain a pirated master disk. Allowing them to maintain this stuff would only result in more violations of the law.
Therefore, in some cases, destruction is the one logical solution. And if a court decides that ChatGPT is infringing goods or pirated equipment, it could order its destruction. In its criticism, the Times argued that ChatGPT conforms to each analogies.
Copyright law has never been used to destroy AI models, but OpenAI shouldn’t take comfort in that fact. The law is increasingly open to the thought of targeting AI.
Consider the recent use of algorithmic disgorgement for instance. The FTC has forced firms like WeightWatchers Not only to delete unlawfully collected data, but in addition the algorithms and AI models trained on this data.
Why ChatGPT will likely continue to exist for an additional day
It seems only a matter of time before copyright law is used to order the destruction of AI models and datasets. But I don't think that can occur on this case. Instead, I see three more likely outcomes.
The first and simplest possibility is that the 2 parties could come to an agreement. In the event of a successful settlement, which could also be likelythe lawsuit could be dismissed and no destruction could be ordered.
Second, the court could side with OpenAI and agree that ChatGPT is “protected” by the copyright doctrine.fair use.” If OpenAI can argue that ChatGPT is transformative and that its service will not be a substitute for The New York Times’ content, it could win.
The third possibility is that OpenAI loses, however the law still saves ChatGPT. Courts can only order destruction if two conditions are met: first, the destruction must not impede lawful activities, and second, it must “the one cure”that would prevent violations.
This signifies that OpenAI could save ChatGPT by either demonstrating that ChatGPT has legitimate, non-infringing uses or that its destruction will not be needed to stop further copyright infringement.
Both outcomes seem possible, but for the sake of argument let's imagine that the primary condition for destruction is met. The court could conclude that, based on the articles in ChatGPT's training data, any uses infringe the Times' copyrights – an argument made in various other lawsuits against generative AI firms.
In this scenario, the court would issue an injunction ordering OpenAI to stop infringing copyrights. Would OpenAI violate this order? Probably not. A lone counterfeiter in a shady warehouse might attempt to get away with it, but one is less likely $100 billion company.
Instead, it could attempt to retrain its AI models without counting on Times articles, or it could develop other software guardrails to stop further problems. Given these possibilities, OpenAI would likely succeed on the second requirement and the court wouldn’t order the destruction of ChatGPT.
Given all of those hurdles, I believe it is incredibly unlikely that a court would order OpenAI to destroy ChatGPT and its training data. But developers should know that courts have the facility to destroy illegal AI, and so they seem increasingly willing to make use of it.
