While you will now be able to permanently delete conversations with the chatbot, any deletions that have already been preserved under a court protection order will still be available as evidence in OpenAI’s ongoing legal proceedings.
Earlier this year, OpenAI was forced to preserve deleted user logs as part of an ongoing multibillion-dollar copyright lawsuit against The New York Times and other news organizations.
The preservation order was issued in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York because it was believed that the deleted chat logs contained evidence that users encouraged ChatGPT to create copyrighted news articles.
The issue had caused outcry from some within the ChatGPT user community, and OpenAI’s lawyers accused the NYT’s lawyers of “overreach” for issuing the demands, saying that it “fundamentally conflicts with the privacy commitments” it made to its users. Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the NYT’s data request “unconscionable” in a post on X.
But earlier this week, U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang approved a general order, first spotted by ArsTechnica, to lift the preservation order. However, any deleted files that had already been preserved under the order will still be available to NYT lawyers as evidence.
According to PCMag: even though you can now permanently delete your chats from ChatGPT logs, it’s probably still not a good idea to share your darkest secrets with the tool. Earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that your ChatGPT conversations are not legally protected and could be brought to court in lawsuits.
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