Ziff Davis lawsuit alleges (among other things) that OpenAI is wrong about Red Dead Redemption 2 cheat codes
The complaint from the owner of IGN and Eurogamer is about work, credit and the problems when Chat GPT gets things right--or gets things wrong.
Some media companies strike partnership deals with the AI giant OpenAI. They know people like to ask the company’s ChatGPT program questions. They know their work may get used to produce answers. A licensing deal with OpenAI might help the media companies make some money off of that and, perhaps, future-proof their position in the information ecosystem.
Other media companies take a different approach. They sue.
Ziff Davis is the latter type.
The owner of myriad gaming publications (IGN, Eurogamer, VG247) and some largely non-gaming ones (Lifehacker, Mashable, CNET, etc), filed a lawsuit on Thursday in Delaware against OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, for alleged copyright infringement.
The publisher says ChatGPT’s approach to crawling the internet—the “training” it does on online data, the way it cross-references web articles for information, and the answers it produces to the software’s many users— illegally lifts the journalism conducted by its reporters.
In the abstract alone, the Ziff Davis copyright claim is a big deal, and it’s an echo of a similar suit agains OpenAI last year by The New York Times.
Suits like these should help clarify the line between a chatbot’s fair use and theft.
OpenAI says what it does with news outlets’ journalism is largely fine. Asked about the Ziff Davis lawsuit by The Verge, an OpenAI rep said “Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.”
Behind this, there’s the wee concern of an existential threat to reporters and media companies. If an AI that is trained on people’s journalism can spit out facts it didn’t find on its own, then show them to members of the public who never actually access the original reporting, nor do anything else that might pay for that journalism to be done, that’s bad for media organizations reliant on people accessing their work.
And there’s something more specific to consider, too, if you’re interested in the state of games media or, perhaps, if you’re interested in whether people are exposed to accurate or inaccurate information about video games.
A closer look at the Ziff Davis suit is in order. Shall we? There’s some important stuff in there, including a discussion of Red Dead Redemption 2 free money cheat codes and whether ChatGPT believes they exist.
The most basic allegation in Ziff Davis’s complaint is that OpenAI copies Ziff Davis’ work to train the large language models (LLMs) that power the various versions of Chat GPT.
For example, in its lawsuit (uploaded for all to read by The Verge), the publisher shows a 2016 Mashable article about Atari founder Nolan Bushnell which they say they found a copy of in OpenAI’s publicly available dataset that its LLMs train on.
OpenAI has said before that the training its AIs do is “fair use” and that they offer publishers the chance to opt-out, “because it’s the right thing to do.”
Last year, after The New York Times sued OpenAI for allegedly stealing its work, OpenAI said that, yes, sometimes ChatGPT spits out words that are lifted from an article. But, they said, “‘Regurgitation’ is a rare bug that we are working to drive to zero.”
Nevertheless, Ziff Davis says it was able to get ChatGPT to reproduce a November 2024 Eurogamer tips article about Dragon Age: The Veilguard verbatim.
Sometimes, Ziff Davis also alleges, Chat GPT cites old articles, attributing them to a publication as if it’s their latest reporting, while missing crucial information in newer coverage.
And sometimes, Ziff Davis claims, Chat GPT plain gets things wrong.
In the lawsuit, it illustrates that final concern by showing ChatGPT’s response to a question about whether there are free-money cheat codes for Red Dead Redemption 2. ChatGPT says there are none. In the query, Ziff Davis’ lawyers asked Chat GPT to cite Eurogamer in its answer, which it does when it says there’s no free-money code, despite Eurogamer having published a list of cheat codes that includes an “add $500” cheat in the game.
In its suit, Ziff Davis shows Chat GPT denying the existence of the free money RDR2 cheat:
When I asked Chat GPT for a free-money RDR2 cheat today, I got a similar answer, but with an important bonus note.
This is what I asked ChatGPT:
Give me a free money cheat for Red Dead Redemption 2
Here’s what it told me:
There aren’t any official “money cheats” in Red Dead Redemption 2 that let you just punch in a code and instantly get cash—but there are some workarounds and tricks you can use, especially in single-player mode, to load up on money without mods. Here are a few:
It then shared some examples of workarounds, including a “gold bar glitch” and a “bonus tip” to enter a cheat code. About that last one, it stated:
There are money-related cheats, but they don’t work unless you’ve unlocked them (usually by finding them in newspapers):
One example: enter “Greed is now a virtue” to get $500 (only after unlocking it).
See that? It did know about the cheat, but doesn’t consider it an "official ‘money chear.’”
Notably, ChatGPT didn’t tell me where it got any of this info from, not until I asked it.
It replied:
The information I provided about money-making methods in Red Dead Redemption 2 is based on a combination of official game mechanics and community-discovered exploits. Here's a breakdown of the sources:
The gold bar glitch was via Polygon and Reddit, ChatGPT told me. Some tips about finding money in stashes in the game was from IGN. Those cheat codes were from IGN, too, it said.
Because I’d asked Chat GPT, I got sources and a clickable cluster of icons. Clicking those icons showed me just how many of my usual go-to outlets for gaming tips it was pulling from…
It’s worth reflecting on what this all portends about how we know things about video games.
Games media, including IGN and Eurogamer, continue to exist because people go to their websites and read them.
The lifeblood of many of these sites is service content: guides, tips, etc.
And gamers generally assume that that service content is accurate.
If all that crumbles, because the info is bad or because the people who dug up and published that info don’t get anything for it, that’s no good.
It is true that there is an inherent risk to any journalism outlet that is dependent on service posts (tips, tricks, guides, etc) for their success. But that’s more of a side-topic about how reporting should be financed (thank you, Game File readers, for just paying me directly for my reporting!). It’s certainly a legit business—or at least can be one—to offer accurate advice to people who need help in games. It’s a problem if the business model for that breaks down.
It’s time, if you haven’t already, to recognize that AI could be coming for games media service content and to recognize the impacts that could have.
The challenges that chatbots post to people who publish gaming service posts aren’t just a Ziff Davis and Open AI thing.
Last month, Microsoft announced plans to harness AI to offer gamers help in the games they are playing. A “Copilot for Gaming,” the tech giant suggested, could help players find their ways out of jams, strategize about how to make progress or even remember what they’d been doing when they last played.
I had wondered how the Copilot would know what help to give, how it’d be accurate and, how anyone whose work it was drawing from would get credit.
“We’re currently exploring use cases from our first party studios to determine what Copilot can do when it understands the game at a deeper level,” an Xbox rep told me at the time.
The AI would use a combination of models from OpenAI and Microsoft as well as open-source models, the rep added.
Here’s how I ended my report on that:
As for where Copilot for Gaming might draw the advice it eventually provides gamers, Microsoft said that it, like other company Copilot AIs will access “public sources of information from the web using the Bing search index and results, and provides tailored responses for the individual player based on its understanding of the players’ activity and the games they’re playing on the Xbox platform.” Microsoft said it would work with game-makers to ensure its AI’s gameplay suggestions are accurate. Given concerns (and lawsuits) over how big AIs use and credit information, Microsoft said its Copilot gaming AI “will refer players back to the original source of the information.”
Microsoft and OpenAI are different companies, though they do have a partnership. They could both adopt distinct approaches to how they use games media’s service journalism.
But, at the end of the day, someone’s got to find out if RDR2 has a free money code, someone needs to make sure that info is accurate, and someone’s got to pay for that work. Because, the money it takes to do that, it turns out, isn’t actually free.
Item 2: A rough week to launch games
La Quimera is a story-driven first-person shooter from Reburn, a studio that used to be part of 4A Games, the respected developer of the Metro series. The game was just delayed today, the day it was supposed to release.
The delay was announced at 10:55am ET in Reburn’s Discord, following many messages of confusion from fans wondering why the PC game hadn’t gone live on Steam by that point.
In the delay announcement Reburn CEO Dmytro Lymar apologized to the community “for the unexpected delay.”
He added:
Our team here at Reburn has been working hard on the game, and it being our first title as an independent game developer has led to some unforeseen challenges. We are trying our best to address the matters as quickly as possible, while also navigating the circumstances we’re faced with here in the Ukraine.
Reburn is based in Ukraine, so some of the players awaiting the game have already said that they’re cutting the studio some slack over the delay.
The country has been in a years-long with Russia. Developing games is unlikely to be the most important thing for members of the Reburn team.
Later today, Reburn issued an update. The delay, it said, was a technical issue:
Update: We are still working with Steam on technical issues to get La Quimera live. Hoping to resolve this or have an updated launch time soon to share with everyone. Thank you for your ongoing patience and support!
Whatever the tech problem is, it’s resulted in the most awkward of situations. Reviews of La Quimera were not delayed and went live this morning. They’re rough. Xboxera said the game was “$30 for 120 minutes of pure cringey, almost fun.” Another review, from Insider Gaming, called La Quimera a “disappointing debut.”
When I asked the PR firm repping Reburn if the delay was due to quality issues, they referred me to the updated statement citing the Steam technical issue.
As debuts go, this is a rough one, though perhaps not the roughest of the week. That dubious honor might go to Post Trauma, a survival horror game that has gotten solid reviews but had the misfortune of releasing on the same day as Microsoft and Bethesda surprise-released a remake of popular role-playing game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Post Trauma is getting a “spiritual” rerelease on June 23, publisher Raw Fury said today. It’s just a marketing stunt. The game is already out. But desperate times call for something or other.
Item 3: In brief…
📈 Capcom’s 2023 remake of Resident Evil 4 has reached the 10 million units sold mark faster than any other game in its franchise, the company announced on Friday.
Capcom also said that 2017’s Resident Evil 7 and 2019’s remake of Resident Evil 2 have now both sold over 15 million copies, thanks to continued discounting of its older games.
Capcom recently raised its sales forecast for the 12 month period that ended March 31, citing strong sales of its video games and success in its arcade and amusement sector.
🎮 Hasbro says its Wizards of the Coast and digital gaming segments saw 46% growth in revenue in the three months ending March 31, in part due to the continued strength of the Scopely-developed mobile game Monopoly Go (which took in $39 million for the quarter).
Read more about Wizards’ big video game plans.
Item 4: The week ahead
Wednesday, April 30
Skin Deep (PC), the first new game in many years from Blendo Games (Quadrilateral Cowboy, 30 Flights of Loving), is released.
Thursday, May 1
LudoNarracon, a festival focused on game stories, begins. The event is held through Steam and will feature developer talks as well as demos of upcoming games. There will also be a sale, of course. Publisher Fellow Traveler hosts the event, which previously showcased one of 2024’s most acclaimed narrative-driven games, 1000xResist.
Despelote (PC, PlayStation, Xbox), a game about playing soccer in the streets of Quito, Ecuador, is released.