Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking toldLast Week Tonights John Oliver a chilling but memorable hypothetical story a decade ago about the potential dangers of AI. The gist is a group of scientists build a superintelligent computer and ask it, Is there a God? The computer answers, There is now and a bolt of lightning zaps the plug preventing it from being shut down. Lets hope thats not what happened with OpenAI and some missing evidence from the New York Times plagiarism lawsuit.Wired reported that a court declaration filed by the New York Times on Wednesday says that OpenAIs engineers accidentally erased evidence of the AIs training data that took a long time to research and compile. OpenAI recovered some of the data but the original file names and folder structure that show when the AI copied its articles into its models are still missing.OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom disagreed with the NYTs claims and says the company will file our response soon. The Times has been battling Microsoft and OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement with its AI models since December of last year.The lawsuit is still in its discovery phase when evidence is requested and delivered by both sides to build its case for trial. OpenAI had to turn over its training data to the Times but hasnt publicly revealed the exact information it used to build the AI modes.Instead, OpenAI created a sandbox of two virtual machines so the NYTs legal team could conduct its research. The NYTs legal team spent more than 150 hours sifting through the data on one of the machines before the data was deleted. OpenAI acknowledged the deletion but the companys legal team called it a glitch. Although OpenAI engineers tried to correct the mistake, the restored data was missing the NYTs work. This led the NYT to essentially recreate everything from scratch. The NYTs lawyers said they had no reason to believe the deletion was intentional.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-new-york-times-says-openai-deleted-evidence-in-its-copyright-lawsuit-231805285.html?src=rss