Why can't they rule it out? Is even OpenAI unable to track the provenance of all of their training data?
This is one of the major problems with these enormous closed models, and even most open-weights models, which don't disclose their training process or training data. You can never be sure what went into its training. Did it come up with an idea originally, or is it just plagiarising its training data? Are there malicious inputs being used to train in particular behaviors when given certain trigger phrases? What are the characteristics of the RLHF data and what kind of biases are those embedding in the models?
With proprietary closed models, or even open weights models that don't have open training datasets, you just can't answer these questions.
This is one of the major problems with these enormous closed models, and even most open-weights models, which don't disclose their training process or training data. You can never be sure what went into its training. Did it come up with an idea originally, or is it just plagiarising its training data? Are there malicious inputs being used to train in particular behaviors when given certain trigger phrases? What are the characteristics of the RLHF data and what kind of biases are those embedding in the models?
With proprietary closed models, or even open weights models that don't have open training datasets, you just can't answer these questions.