What's The Secret? OpenAI Is Battling To Keep Co-Founder's Files Confidential, Here's Why

In an ongoing high-profile copyright lawsuit, OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research lab, is making efforts to keep the files of its former co-founder, Ilya Sutskever, confidential.

What Happened: There is a disagreement between the lawyers of the Author’s Guild and OpenAI over which files should be included in the discovery process of the lawsuit.

OpenAI has raised objections to the inclusion of six of its current and former employees as “custodians” in the lawsuit, a term that refers to individuals who have relevant evidence for the discovery process.

The individuals in question include former co-founder and chief scientist Sutskever, pretraining data lead Qiming Yuan, technical staff members Jong Wook Kim and Shantanu Jain, former research scientist Cullen O’Keefe, and former science communicator Andrew Mayne. Lawyers are of the opinion that Sutskever possesses documents that are relevant to the lawsuit, but OpenAI has not publicly stated why it is against their inclusion in the discovery process.

The lawyers of the Author’s Guild are now calling on the judge to step in and force OpenAI to include these individuals as custodians.

Also Read: Whistleblowers Accuse OpenAI Of Hindering Staff From Reporting AI Risks

OpenAI, on the other hand, has asked for a complete redaction of all six exhibits attached to the letter, arguing that they contain proprietary source code and detailed processes for training and testing ChatGPT models.

The lawsuit is one of several that claim OpenAI violated copyright laws by using millions of books to train its AI models. Among the notable plaintiffs are authors George R. R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and David Baldacci.

Why It Matters: This lawsuit is significant as it brings to light the complex issues surrounding the use of copyrighted materials in training AI models.

The outcome of this case could set a precedent for future lawsuits of a similar nature. OpenAI’s efforts to keep certain documents confidential could be seen as an attempt to protect its proprietary technology and processes, highlighting the competitive and secretive nature of the AI industry.

The inclusion of high-profile authors as plaintiffs underscores the potential impact of AI on creative industries and raises questions about the ethical use of copyrighted works in AI development.

Read Next

OpenAI's Sam Altman Has An Estimated $2 Billion Net Worth — And Much Of It Doesn't Come From AI

This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.