OpenAI Employees Were Proud ChatGPT Could Bypass the New York Times Paywall

George Hammond and Stephen Morris, reporting for the Financial Times: OpenAI copied millions of copyrighted articles in an effort to build technology potentially worth “gazillions”, despite recognising the “existential threat” it posed to publishers, according to a new filing in a lawsuit brought by The New York Times… But lawyers for the newspaper claim the “defendants repeatedly copied millions of… copyrighted articles in their entirety without permission to produce substitutive commercial AI products”. The lawyers added OpenAI did so despite knowing their AI tools could replace the underlying material. The AI lab’s head of ChatGPT wrote that publishers faced an “existential threat” from AI products that “are largely substitutive, period [and] will get more and more substitutive as they get better”, according to Thursday’s filing… The filing also claims OpenAI employed “transgressive and deceptive” techniques to acquire paywalled content, and that Brockman, now OpenAI’s president…