OpenAI Loses Fight To Keep ChatGPT Logs Secret In Copyright Case (reuters.com)
- Reference: 0180278771
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/12/04/0011222/openai-loses-fight-to-keep-chatgpt-logs-secret-in-copyright-case
- Source link: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/openai-loses-fight-keep-chatgpt-logs-secret-copyright-case-2025-12-03/
> U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang in a decision made public on Wednesday said that the 20 million logs were relevant to the outlets' claims and that handing them over would not risk violating users' privacy. The judge rejected OpenAI's privacy-related objections to an earlier order requiring the artificial intelligence startup to submit the records as evidence. "There are multiple layers of protection in this case precisely because of the highly sensitive and private nature of much of the discovery," Wang said.
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> An OpenAI spokesperson on Wednesday cited an earlier blog post from the company's Chief Information Security Officer Dane Stuckey, which said the Times' demand for the chat logs "disregards long-standing privacy protections" and "breaks with common-sense security practices." OpenAI has separately appealed Wang's order to the case's presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein.
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> A group of newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital's MediaNews Group is also involved in the lawsuit. MediaNews Group executive editor Frank Pine said in a statement on Wednesday that OpenAI's leadership was "hallucinating when they thought they could get away with withholding evidence about how their business model relies on stealing from hardworking journalists."
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/openai-loses-fight-keep-chatgpt-logs-secret-copyright-case-2025-12-03/
[2] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/11/12/2158208/openai-fights-order-to-turn-over-millions-of-chatgpt-conversations
Why are there logs? (Score:2)
I'm not very AI saavy so this may be a dumb question.
Why do the logs exist to begin with? Do the ChatGPT algorithms use them to "learn?"
Re: (Score:3)
Training data, issue diagnosis, market research, targeting data for ads, probably to sell it to others at some time.
Criminals fail to hide the evidence? (Score:2)
Such a shame. I think we should be "tough on crime" on these people!
Re: (Score:2)
The "tough on crime" stance doesn't concern white-collar, billionaire crime. That one falls squarely into the "settlement" or "pardon" category, except in the rare cases that other billionaires were the target of he said crime. Mostly.
If only there was some kind of "intelligent" tool (Score:2)
that you could feed the logs into and have it detect Names, SSNs, Phone numbers and other PII data and replace it with asterisks.
You know, a tool that's not a real person but has some ability to do seemingly intelligent things. There's a name for it, it's on the tip of my tongue.
Re: (Score:2)
It is called "a perl one-liner".
We used to cobble them all the time in the few minutes between important tasks back in the day before the social networking and vibe-coding took over.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The only decent thing to do is to keep these anonymized. If they become public record every bit of personal information entered into chat GPT will be public knowledge. SSNs. ID card scans. affairs. mental problems. Health problems. There shouldn't even be a question here.
Re: (Score:3)
There is no practical way to do that. Seriously.
In order to do it properly you'd need to have a process similar to declassification redactions, where a human can reason about real-world context. And you'd need a lot of bodies to do that to 20M chats in any reasonable amount of time.
"De-identification" automation can sometimes give you a dataset that by itself is anonymized. You really need structured input data for that, though, and the real problem is that there are frequently ways to "enrich" an anonym
Re: (Score:2)
> There is no practical way to do that. Seriously.
I agree. Well, you cannot get everything out and specific things like, say, SSN or more common health problems, can be blanked out with patterns. But misspell the name of the condition you have or describe it instead of using its name and you are already screwed in most cases. And names, quasi-identifiers of people, etc. are basically impossible to recognize reliably.
Hence what needs to be done here is also that anybody working on the data needs to be under oath to not leak any personal data and all process
Re: (Score:1)
> There is no practical way to do that. Seriously.
Sure there is. You just need a [1]1,000 FBI agents working overtime [house.gov], just like they did with the Epstein files.
[1] https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/ahead-of-hearing-ranking-member-raskin-presses-fbi-director-patel-on-epstein-cover-up-who-exactly-are-you-protecting-and-why
Re: (Score:2)
> There is no practical way to do that. Seriously.
> You could use AI to do it. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
1. Almost everyone.
2. Yes.