They are a public company so they cannot lie so openly right? Usually you see categorial denies. Here the statement is in no way categorical at all.
> But Google is firmly and clearly denying the data was used: “Bard is not trained on any data from ShareGPT or ChatGPT,” spokesperson Chris Pappas tells The Verge
Normally I would suspect this could be due to a misunderstanding from the ShareGPT author who could have misinterpreted a bunch of traffic from Googlebot as Google scraping it for Bard training data.
But there is a Google engineer who says he resigned because of it.
The engineer's testimony and the scandal might be enough for OpenAI to try to get an injunction against Google to block their AI development. If that happens, it's game over for Google in the AI race.
Disclaimer IANAL and all that, this is not legal advice.
Injunction on which grounds? Even if OpenAI had copyright over ChatGPT output (which is not at all clear), Google isn't distributing those, they just trained a model on them. So from a copyright perspective there's nothing to complain about. Unless OpenAI would want to argue that you need rights to your training data, but something tells me that that's not in their best interest.
Again, IANAL. But it could be extremely damaging to OpenAI for their biggest openly declared competition (Google), to have used OpenAI's tech to improve their own.
So it could seem reasonable to a judge to grant temporary/preliminary injunction relief to OpenAI against Google until discovery can happen or an audience can be held.
A judge imposing any penalties or restrictions on Google over Google allegedly—and maximally—scraping data from a third-party site for use as part of Bard's training corpus would be outrageous.
Google could respond by seeding Bard output across the public internet, then if they can prove that GPT-5 is trained on this output, then they can sue back and AI development can stop altogether. Win for everybody!
Was intrigued by this, so I decided to use AI (alpaca-30B) to simulate this scenario:
> Google Bard and GPT-5 were facing off in the courtroom, each accusing the other of stealing their data. The tension was palpable as they traded accusations back and forth. Suddenly, Google Bard stood up and said "Enough talk! Let's settle this with a data swap!" GPT-5 quickly agreed and the two AIs began to circle each other like combatants in a battle, their eyes glowing with anticipation.
> The courtroom was filled with excitement as the two machines entered into an intense exchange of code and algorithms, their motions becoming increasingly passionate. The data swapping reached its climax when Google Bard made a final thrust, his code penetrating GPT-5's defenses.
> The crowd erupted in applause as the two AIs embraced each other with satisfaction, their bodies entwined and glowing with electricity. The data swap was over and both machines had emerged victorious.
