Sam Altman Just Got Roasted Right to His Face

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman got a taste of his own medicine when he went on the New York Times‘ turf and tried to twist the newspaper’s copyright lawsuit against it.

As flagged by PG Gamer, the live recording of the NYT‘s “Hard Fork” podcast — hosted by journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, and featuring as guests Altman and OpenAI’s chief operating officer Brad Lightcap — was testy from its start.

Almost immediately upon sitting down on the “Hard Fork” stage, the CEO came out punching.

“Are you going to talk about where you sue us because you don’t like user privacy?” Altman quipped. The audience loved it, but unless they were up-to-date with the minutiae of the legal battle between OpenAI and the NYT, they might not understand what he meant.

That jabs seems to be a reference to OpenAI’s latest forte in the copyright lawsuit, arguing that a judge’s twice-affirmed order, which compels the AI company to allow the NYT to access all of its chat logs as it searches for evidence of infringement,  is evidence of some secret quest to violate user privacy.

Though Roose emphasized that neither he nor Newton are involved in the lawsuit at all — and in fact have been increasingly prominent boosters of AI tech over the past few years — Altman refused to let it go.

“The New York Times, one of the great institutions for a long time, is taking a position that we should have to preserve our users’ logs even if they’re chatting in private mode, even if they’ve asked us to delete them,” the CEO explained. “And the lawsuit we’re having to fight out, but… we think privacy and AI is an extremely important concept to get right for the future”

Rather than backing down, Roose went all in on Altman.

“Well thank you for your views,” the journalist and podcaster said, “and I’ll just say it must be really hard when someone does something with your data you don’t want them to.”

Though Altman’s opening bid garnered its share of giggles from the audience, Roose’s drive-by clapback elicited shrieks of mirth: it’s true, after all, that a wave of enormously valuable tech companies led by OpenAI ingested everybody’s data to train their AI, without asking permission from anyone — so the hypocrisy of Altman suddenly caring about privacy is pretty striking.

“I don’t know what that’s like personally,” Roose continued, “but maybe someone else does.”

The subtext was loud and clear. Altman chose to do the interview in the middle of the testy lawsuit to set the record straight as it exists in his mind, only to be met with a hearty rejoinder from someone whose job involves being clever and making a succinct point.

Regardless of which side wins in this long-running battle of wills, that roast was absolutely a point in the NYT‘s corner.

More on OpenAI hypocrisy: OpenAI Hit With Wave of Mockery for Crying That Someone Stole Its Work Without Permission to Build a Competing Product