Bloom Filter Enters OpenAI Copyright Lawsuit
arpit_bhayani · x · 2026-07-11
A TechCrunch article notes that a Bloom filter has unexpectedly become key evidence in the lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI.
The post explains the engineering logic: since ChatGPT outputs rarely match source texts exactly, running exhaustive exact matches on all outputs is impossible. Instead, OpenAI likely chops copyrighted texts into small overlapping fragments, hashes them into a Bloom filter, and applies the same process to model outputs. This allows for a low-cost screening to flag outputs "worth a closer look." The article also mentions this internal tool is allegedly dubbed Project Giraffe, designed to roughly filter potentially copyrighted content rather than perform exact matches across all outputs.
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