ChatGPT uses copyrighted content? Netizens find ‘proof’ in viral clip amid OpenAI lawsuits

In early February 2025, major news organisations in the US dragged OpenAI to court with a lawsuit claiming that its AI chatbot, ChatGPT, used copyrighted content from the Internet to create training models. While the company denied the claims and insisted that it only used ‘publicly-available content,’ a viral social media post suggests both, a truth and a lie.

A clip posted on Instagram featured multiple screenshots of ChatGPT struggling hard to generate a picture of a wine glass filled to the brim. In every instance, the AI only managed to generate pictures of half-filled wine glasses despite the user’s repeated prompts to fill up the empty space.

The page argued that AI image generators like ChatGPT, which uses DALL-E models, find it difficult to produce a picture of a wine glass filled to the brim because they simply do not exist in plenty on the Internet.

Most photographic and film shots depict half-filled wine glasses as per our serving practices, usually seen at hotels or elsewhere.

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Since the AI is trained on data from the Internet, it is unable to ‘think’ and generate content that is not already out there. As such, when asked to generate a glass full of wine, it failed and even added a dome of flowing wine in one attempt.

Many users pointed out that ChatGPT also struggles with images of left-handed people since there aren’t many on the Internet that contain such text. The case is also the same with prompts telling the Chabot not to generate something. For example, a prompt asking ChatGPT or other AI to create a room without giraffes will result in an image containing giraffes.

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It is thus clear that OpenAI, Gemini, or any other AI for that matter is likely using public data on the Internet which may or may not be copyrighted. Many comments argued that this was one of the reasons ChatGPT was illegal, should shut down, or go completely free. However, the verdict rests on the courts to decide.