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Ask HN: Isn't ChatGPT unfair to the sources it scraped data from?

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Re: Ask HN: Isn't ChatGPT unfair to the sources it scraped data from?

#71

Post by pixl97 »

snshn wrote: post #27

It's akin to saying that everyone who writes a book today must give credit to everyone who contributed to the creation of modern written language and printing tools.

Yea, we've been seeing these posts over and over again on this same topic, and most of it for me boils down to

"If you applied the same set of rules to a human, how exactly would that look"

Simply put culture is the copying of each others ideas. When one of us started banging rocks together to make them sharp they didn't sell this idea to others, at best they traded sharpened arrows for something else.

The big issue with humans is we are commonly very conservative in our ideas. "Yesterday I did X, today I did X, and tomorrow I'll do X", fine and dandy until tomorrow a machine does X for nearly free. Instead of figuring out how to adapt our economic systems to deal with new systems of cheap and plenty the fearful and the greedy are looking for ways to maximize the amount they can profit or hold it back to maintain status quo.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't ChatGPT unfair to the sources it scraped data from?

#73

Post by Retr0id »

_qzu4 wrote: post #44
ergonaught wrote: post #13

Is it unfair for you to create content/products/etc after you have read and learned from various sources on the internet, potentially depriving them of clicks/income? People get internet hostile at me for this question, but it really is that simple. They've automated you, and it's definitely going to be a problem, but if it's acceptable for your brain to do the same thing, you're going to have to find a different ang…

> Is it unfair for you to create content/products/etc after you have read and learned from various sources on the internet, potentially depriving them of clicks/income? Because it's false equivalence? ChatGPT isn't a human being. It's a product that is built upon data from other sources. The question is if this data is legal to scrape, which it is: Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms [ https://news.ycom…

Being allowed to scrape something does not absolve you of all intellectual property, copyright, moral, etc. issues arising from subsequent use of the scraped data.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't ChatGPT unfair to the sources it scraped data from?

#74

Post by paulcole »

pixl97 wrote: post #57
blue_cookeh wrote: post #3

100% agree - the likes of ChatGPT are straight up generating revenue based on adding value to stolen work.

Lets turn this around the other way. I create a omniscient copyright detection bot and face it at everything you create 24 hours a day 7 days a week. You go home and sing happy birthday to your kid. The bot gives you a non-monetary warning for using a copyrighted work without permission. No big deal, but it is on your permanent record. It had been a stressful day so you take up your evening hobby of painting. You lik…

The first two situations you mention almost certainly aren’t copyright violations. The third is at least a solid “maybe.”

Re: Ask HN: Isn't ChatGPT unfair to the sources it scraped data from?

#77

Post by anileated »

ergonaught wrote: post #13

Is it unfair for you to create content/products/etc after you have read and learned from various sources on the internet, potentially depriving them of clicks/income? People get internet hostile at me for this question, but it really is that simple. They've automated you, and it's definitely going to be a problem, but if it's acceptable for your brain to do the same thing, you're going to have to find a different ang…

It’s fair if you do this; neither fair nor legal [0] when a commercial for-profit entity, backed by a large corporation, does it at scale and capitalizes on that.

Imagine if you were a webmaster and Google unilaterally decided to stop sending users to content you have worked to research and write, and instead aggregated it and showed the answer to user’s query entirely on its own pages, without any attribution or payment to you. Unimaginable, yet that is very much the scenario unfolding now. [1]

Scraping at this kind of scale is out of your (or any given individual’s) reach. It is, however, within reach of the likes of Microsoft (on whose billions OpenAI basically exists) and Google (who, to be fair, have not abused it in such a blatant way so far).

[0] It is clearly using someone else’s works for commercial purposes, including to create derivative works. (Again, it’s different from you creating a work derivative from someone else’s work you read previously, because in this case a corporation does it at scale for profit.)

[1] And the cynic in me says the only reason we are not yet out with pitchforks is simply because OpenAI is new and shiny and has “open” in its name (never mind the shadow of Microsoft looming all over it), while Google is an entrenched behemoth that we all had some degree of dissatisfaction with in the past and thus are constantly watching out for.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't ChatGPT unfair to the sources it scraped data from?

#78

Post by beepbooptheory »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #59
beepbooptheory wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think just maybe there is a diffence here because humans need money to survive, and maybe we should have compassion for humans who could hypothetically starve or freeze or suicide or whatever because they have no money? Or is it just silly to care about people like that?

This is a response to an argument the GP didn't make. One can still have grave concerns about generative AI's potential impact on human society while accepting there is nothing fundamentally unfair about how it scrapes publicly accessible data.

Ok, so, what is that argument then? Maybe you just want to say: "well this is such a big deal its going to change everything anyway, so we can't judge it on how it will affect today's society, but rather the society it will create." If so, all one can really say to such longtermism is: "well, good luck with that I guess, I will keep trying to survive over here."

Re: Ask HN: Isn't ChatGPT unfair to the sources it scraped data from?

#79

Post by dawsoneliasen »

nCave wrote: post #70
ergonaught wrote: post #13

Is it unfair for you to create content/products/etc after you have read and learned from various sources on the internet, potentially depriving them of clicks/income? People get internet hostile at me for this question, but it really is that simple. They've automated you, and it's definitely going to be a problem, but if it's acceptable for your brain to do the same thing, you're going to have to find a different ang…

Does anyone actually find these arguments persuasive? There is really no reason to believe that what chatGPT or stable diffusion does is anything like what "your brain" does--except in the most superficial, inconsequential way. Second, try applying this logic to literally anything else and you'll see why it's absurd: "You can't ban cars from driving on sidewalks! If it's acceptable for people to walk on sidewalks, th…

Yes, and: why shouldn’t it matter that in one case it is a person and in another it is a computer program?

Why would it be incoherent to say “I’m okay with a person reading, synthesizing, and then utilizing this synthesis—but I’m not okay with a company profiting off of a computer doing the same thing.” What’s wrong with that?

But again, like you and others have said, it’s really not the same thing at all! All ChatGPT (or any other deep learning model) is capable of doing is synthesizing “in the most superficial way.” What a person does is completely different, much more interesting.

Re: Ask HN: Isn't ChatGPT unfair to the sources it scraped data from?

#80

Post by bdhcuidbebe »

Pigalowda wrote: post #54
naillo wrote: post #30

Never realized how little data it was fed with. 570GB can fit on my laptop.

1GB file would contain roughly 166,000,000 words. This includes the space between words, so the average word is 5 characters. A typical single-spaced page is 500 words long That’s 179,280,000 full pages of text. I wonder if they excluded any duplicated text.

But its not just words…
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