Facepalm: In a move that some have described as hypocritical to the point of being funny, OpenAI, the ChatGPT creator that is being sued by multiple entities for copyright infringement, has filed a complaint against a ChatGPT-focused subreddit for, you guessed it, copyright infringement. But the company appears to have backtracked.

OpenAI filed a copyright complaint to Reddit over the unauthorized use of the company’s copyrighted logo by the r/ChatGPT subreddit.

Reddit passed the message on to the forum’s moderators. It notes that the subreddit profile image does use ChatGPT’s logo, which may lead to user confusion. Reddit asked the mods to address the unauthorized copyrighted elements by May 16.

The r/ChatGPT subreddit has 5.4 million members, making it one of the Top 1% of subreddits as ranked by size.

OpenAI filing a copyright claim is pretty much the definition of irony. There’s a long list of companies and people suing the firm for scraping the internet and using copyrighted material to train its LLMs without permission, payment, or accreditation. Authors, creators, and newspaper publishers make up a lot of that list, including The New York Times, The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Denver Post. Elon Musk, who is also suing OpenAI, called the move hypocritical.

The good news for the moderators of r/ChatGPT is that in the last few hours, OpenAI has backtracked and allowed the group to use its logo.

A message posted by one of the mods states that a legal team confirmed that it’s okay to use the official logo. The only mandate is that the group updates its disclaimers to include a statement that reads “Use of the OpenAI logo is with permission from OpenAI; all rights in OpenAI’s trademarks belong to OpenAI.”

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It’s possible that OpenAI realized how much bad publicity it would receive by not allowing the Reddit forum to use its logo and reversed course. OpenAI has repeatedly said that AI companies such as itself will win copyright infringement lawsuits based on the fair use argument.

In other OpenAI news today, the company has revealed it is considering allowing people to use its products to create AI-generate pornography and other NSFW material.