Ex-OpenAI Researcher And Whistleblower Found Dead

A former OpenAI researcher turned whistleblower, Suchir Balaji, 26, was found dead in a San Francisco apartment, authorities confirmed, as first reported by The Mercury News.

Police discovered Balaji’s body on November 26 after receiving a welfare check request. The San Francisco medical examiner’s office ruled the death a suicide, and investigators found no signs of foul play, said BBC.

In the months leading up to his death, Balaji had publicly criticized OpenAI’s practices. The company is currently facing multiple lawsuits over its data-gathering methods.

I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I’m skeptical “fair use” would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post (https://t.co/xhiVyCk2Vk) about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I…

— Suchir Balaji (@suchirbalaji) October 23, 2024

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Mr. Balaji said he saw the threats posed by AI as immediate and significant. He argued that ChatGPT and similar chatbots are undermining the commercial viability of individuals, businesses, and internet services that originally created the digital data used to train these systems.

OpenAI, Microsoft, and other companies maintain that training their AI systems on internet data falls under the “fair use” doctrine.

This doctrine considers four factors, and these companies assert they meet the criteria, including significantly transforming copyrighted works and not directly competing in the same market as those works.

Mr. Balaji disagreed. He contended that systems like GPT-4 make complete copies of training data. While companies like OpenAI can program these systems to either replicate the data or produce entirely new outputs, the reality, he says, lies somewhere in between, as reported by The Times.

Mr. Balaji published an essay on his personal website, offering what he describes as a mathematical analysis to support this claim. “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he said, as reported by The Times.

According to Mr. Balaji, the technology violates copyright law because it often directly competes with the works it was trained on. Generative models, designed to mimic online data, can substitute for nearly anything on the internet, from news articles to online forums, reported The Times.

Balaji’s death occurred just one day after a court filing identified him as a person whose professional files OpenAI would review in connection with a lawsuit filed by several authors against the startup, noted Forbes.

Beyond legal concerns, Mr. Balaji warned that AI technologies are degrading the internet. As these tools replace existing services, they often generate false or entirely fabricated information — a phenomenon researchers call “hallucinations.” He believed this shift is changing the internet for the worse, reported The Times.

Bradley J. Hulbert, an intellectual property lawyer, noted that current copyright laws were established long before the advent of AI and that no court has yet ruled on whether technologies like ChatGPT violate these laws, as reported by The Times.

He emphasized the need for legislative action. “Given that A.I. is evolving so quickly,” he said, “it is time for Congress to step in.” Mr. Balaji concurred, stating, “The only way out of all this is regulation,” reported The Times.