The New York Times says OpenAI deleted evidence in its copyright lawsuit

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking told Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver a chilling but memorable hypothetical story a decade ago about the potential dangers of AI. The gist is a group of scientists build a superintelligent computer and ask it, “Is there a God?” The computer answers, “There is now” and a bolt of lightning zaps the plug preventing it from being shut down. Let’s hope that’s not what happened with OpenAI and some missing evidence from the New York Times’ plagiarism lawsuit.

Wired reported that a court declaration filed by the New York Times on Wednesday says that OpenAI’s engineers accidentally erased evidence of the AI’s training data that took a long time to research and compile. OpenAI recovered some of the data but “the original file names and folder structure” that show when the AI copied its articles into its ...