OpenAI's Data Deletion Raises Concerns in NY Times Copyright Lawsuit

OpenAI is facing a lawsuit from The New York Times and Daily News for allegedly using their copyrighted content to train its AI models without permission. During the legal proceedings, OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data on a virtual machine that was being used to search for the plaintiffs' content in OpenAI's training sets. Although OpenAI managed to recover most of the data, the loss of folder structures and file names rendered it unusable for the plaintiffs' purposes. OpenAI denies intentional deletion, attributing the issue to a system misconfiguration requested by the plaintiffs. The incident highlights ongoing tensions over AI training practices and copyright infringement.