OpenAI Pushes Prompt-Hacking Defense to Deflect Copyright Claims

OpenAI Inc. is making manipulation of ChatGPT central to its defense against a wave of copyright lawsuits from publishers and authors—accusing some of “prompt hacking” and seeking vast troves of documents to learn exactly what questions they fed into the artificial intelligence tool to yield the outputs underlying their claims.

Access to the black box of plaintiffs’ chatbot prompts could enable OpenAI, usually named as a co-defendant with Microsoft Corp., to bolster its assertions that outputs regurgitating protected works are “highly anomalous results” only possible through tens of thousands of attempts and “deceptive prompts.”

The discovery strategy ...