Thursday, 13th November 2025
What happens if AI labs train for pelicans riding bicycles?
Almost every time I share a new example of an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle a variant of this question pops up: how do you know the labs aren’t training for your benchmark?
[... 324 words]On Monday, this Court entered an order requiring OpenAI to hand over to the New York Times and its co-plaintiffs 20 million ChatGPT user conversations [...]
OpenAI is unaware of any court ordering wholesale production of personal information at this scale. This sets a dangerous precedent: it suggests that anyone who files a lawsuit against an AI company can demand production of tens of millions of conversations without first narrowing for relevance. This is not how discovery works in other cases: courts do not allow plaintiffs suing Google to dig through the private emails of tens of millions of Gmail users irrespective of their relevance. And it is not how discovery should work for generative AI tools either.
— Nov 12th letter from OpenAI to Judge Ona T. Wang, re: OpenAI, Inc., Copyright Infringement Litigation