OpenAI told the Delhi High Court on Tuesday that its use of publicly available data to train ChatGPT is not a commercial activity by itself [ANI Media Pvt Ltd v. Open AI Opco LLC]. .Appearing for OpenAI, Senior Advocate Amit Sibal argued that this is a neutral activity which can be put to both commercial and non-commercial use. “My private use of publicly available works for research, including training my LLM is not in and of itself commercial. It will be commercial if I provide that as a service to others, this is otherwise a neutral activity, and it can be put to commercial and non-commercial use,” he said. .The submission was made before Justice Amit Bansal during the hearing of Asian News International (ANI)'s copyright infringement suit against OpenAI.ANI has alleged that its original content is being exploited by OpenAI for commercial gain and to train the large-language model of ChatGPT for answering the user queries. It was argued that just because ANI content is publicly available, OpenAI does not get the right to exploit it or create copies of it to store..Sibal today argued that ChatGPT drives traffic to ANI’s website, and there has been no allegation that any commercial harm is being caused to the news agency.“ChatGPT has been around for 3 years. The plaintiff has given no evidence given to show that his revenue has reduced, there is no averment also. We are not competing in a news syndication service. We caution that it is not reliable information."In response to the Court’s query about whether ChatGPT can be sued for giving a wrong answer, Sibal said that the public is advised to go to the news source and mistakes cannot be ruled out totally. “As the LLM becomes more sophisticated, such instances would come down. It serves myriad uses that plaintiff [ANI] does not see,” he said. OpenAI does not reproduce works of others without a license, Sibal said in conclusion. .The Court has listed the case for further consideration on May 16, when it will hear rejoinder arguments from ANI and amicus curiae, Advocate Adarsh Ramanujan and Dr Arul George Scaria.It also hinted that the hearing of the case may continue after summer vacations in June, as it has to consider the submissions from intervenors. .[Read live coverage]
