Could OpenAI vs NYT’s lawsuit impact the AI industry as a whole? PLUS: Why do we have leap years?

OpenAI is accusing The New York Times of manipulating ChatGPT to support its copyright lawsuit against the AI creators. OpenAI argues that the Gray Lady basically took advantage of a bug in ChatGPT that they were fine-tuning and gorged the chatbot with NYT articles to extract word-for-word passages from the very same text they put in it, according to The Verge. But the NYT isn’t having it, maintaining that it was not “a hack,” and that they were merely using OpenAI’s tools to uncover proof that their content had been taken without permission, the Times’ lead counsel Ian Crosby tells The Verge.

When did this all begin? Last December, NYT filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for the unauthorized use of their published work to train ChatGPT. On Monday, OpenAI filed a motion claiming that NYT directly fed the chatbot articles to manipulate it into recreating verbatim passages. If granted by the federal court, OpenAI’s motion would dismiss four of NYT’s seven copyright infringement claims against it.

If guilty, could OpenAI handle the blow? It’s unclear: AI companies are facing a steady slew of lawsuits coming their way by establishments such as the NYT, who are seasoned veterans in copyright claims (fun fact: NYT’s lawsuit marks the first major American media organization to sue OpenAI). However, these mounting cases could be a threat to OpenAI and other companies in the burgeoning AI industry, suggest the Verge’s Nilay Patel and Sarah Jeong.

Other violations OpenAI is battling include an accusation that it willingly contributed to the infringement, that it had failed to remove copyrighted material, and that these practices created unfair competition, among others. This isn’t the first time OpenAI has faced a lawsuit of this kind. In June of 2023, a group of authors filed complaints against the company that included copyright infringement, removing copyright management information, and unjust enrichment. OpenAI denied all accusations… except direct copyright infringement.

Why do we have leap years? For centuries, societies have adopted different systems to account for imperfect manmade calendars in a bid to match their timekeeping methods with natural time cycles. A solar year is about 365.2422 days long — but ignoring the decimals meant that, over time, seasons fell out of sync with specific months, which was problematic for ancient civilizations that relied on seasons to keep track of harvests and religious festivities, according to National Geographic. Fast forward to today, and most of the world has embraced the Gregorian calendar with its leap-year system to keep our days and months in sync with the seasons.

Getting it right took some math and … a little bit of creativity: Ancient Egyptians, among others, relied on a lunar calendar, in which each year is 354 days and each month is around 29.5 days, but that created an 11-day gap with a full solar year. The Sumerian calendar divided the 365 days of the year over 12 months, which created a smaller (but still significant) five-day gap, so our ancestors would just tack on a few days of celebration at the end of each year to bridge the difference.

Some — including Caesar — were less successful than others: Around 46 BC, Rome’s lunar calendar was falling far behind the seasons, even though Julius Caesar attempted to address the issue by randomly adding additional days or months to a year. Eventually, Caesar co-opted the leap year system, which Egypt had already been using a couple hundred years earlier. But to make up for lost time, he enforced one 445-day-long “Year of Confusion” before shifting to a leap year system that had 365.25 days per year. It worked smoothly for a long spell — but by the sixteenth century, an imperfection in the quarter extra day added up and caused important dates to go off schedule by about 10 days.

Enter Pope Gregory XIII: To keepimportant Christian holidays on schedule he developed the Gregorian calendar where the leap year remained the practice, but any leap years divisible by 100 are skipped unless they are also divisible by 400, like the year 2000. Now, his calendar is widely adopted although, of course, certain non-Gregorian calendars thrived — such as the Islamic Calendar that does not incorporate leap years.

Fun fact: Pope Gregory was still a bit off, technically speaking: His calendar system results in a year of 365.2425 days, which means that it’s half a minute longer than the solar year. But, we won’t feel the difference except for around 3.3k years from now, and that will only be a day or so.