That’s not a very good analogy because the band would be reproducing an entire work of art which an LLM does not and cannot. And by prompt manipulation I mean purposely making it seem like the LLM is doing something it wouldn’t do on its own. The operating word is seem, which is what I meant by manipulation. The prompting here is irrelevant, but how it’s done is. So unless The Times releases the steps they used to get ChatGPT to output what it did, you can’t really claim that that’s what it does.

In a blog post, OpenAI said the Times “is not telling the full story.” It took particular issue with claims that its ChatGPT AI tool reproduced Times stories verbatim, arguing that the Times had manipulated prompts to include regurgitated excerpts of articles. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said.