OpenAI, a company built on 'scraping' content without permission, makes a copyright claim against a subreddit using its logo
OpenAI is a company built on the work of others. Techbros may hail CEO Sam Altman as some sort of digital messiah but, with apologies to Monty Python, really he's just a very naughty boy, who understands that if OpenAI hoovers up as much content as it can to train its models, then all we can do is close the stable door long after the horse is bolted. OpenAI trains ChatGPT on copyrighted content by design, and dares society to try and stop it (on which note, good luck to the New York Times with its lawsuit).
One of the advantages of all that lovely venture capital flowing in is that OpenAI can afford all the lawyers it wants to fight these battles. But maybe there was something of a lull recently, because OpenAI has issued a «copyright complaint» against the r/ChatGPT subreddit for the use of the OpenAI logo.
The news came in a post to the subreddit (first spotted by 404Media), which included a screenshot of this message received from Reddit:
«Hello Mods, We have received a copyright complaint from openai.com alleging unauthorized use of their copyrighted logos in r/ChatGPT. The 'subreddit profile image' does make use of the copyrighted content, which can lead to user confusion: please address the unauthorized copyrighted elements by May 16.»
The mods were asked to remove the OpenAI logo and reply confirming they'd done so.
«It does not seem wise for OpenAI to start enforcing copyright claims,» observes not_wyoming, a user on r/ChatGPT. «Ironic for a company who scraped the entire internet,» adds Elsa_Versailles. Nelculiungran says «this is so hypocritical it hurts…» and Kiwizoo replies «well considering they used all our Reddit posts to train the thing, I agree.»
The last comment refers to Reddit's recent agreement to sell user data in order to train AI, which is currently the subject of an FTC enquiry. The most amusing responses to the copyright claim came from users who were inspired to prompt ChatGPT into generating OpenAI logos that wouldn't infringe on the
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