According to news.bloomberglaw.com, OpenAI Inc. must turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT logs in a consolidated copyright infringement case after District Judge Sidney H. Stein rejected the company’s objections to a magistrate judge’s discovery order.
In his order issued Monday, Judge Stein affirmed Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang’s November ruling in favor of news organization plaintiffs, which include New York Times Co. and Chicago Tribune Co. LLC, according to the report. OpenAI had argued the order insufficiently weighed privacy concerns and sought to produce only search results of the logs rather than the full dataset.
According to news.bloomberglaw.com, Judge Wang rejected OpenAI’s proposal, stating that no case law requires courts to order the least burdensome discovery possible. The news plaintiffs initially requested a 120 million-log sample in July, but agreed to OpenAI’s counteroffer of 20 million logs—representing 0.5% of its preserved conversations.
Judge Stein distinguished OpenAI’s cited precedent, noting that ChatGPT’s legal ownership of the logs is uncontested and users voluntarily submitted their communications, according to the report. The ruling is part of multidistrict litigation in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York consolidating 16 copyright lawsuits against OpenAI, which news.bloomberglaw.com describes as addressing “critical, novel questions about how copyright law applies to AI.”