Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copyright is a practical right, not an inherent right. The only reasons humans get copyright at all is because it's useful for society to give it to them. The onus should be on OpenAI to prove that it will benefit society overall if AIs are given copyright. We've already decided that many non-human processes/entities don't get copyright because there doesn't seem to be any reason to grant those entities copyright. --…
> The comparison to humans is interesting though, because teaching a human how to do something doesn't grant you copyright over their output. Ehh, in rare cases in can though. If you have someone sign an NDA, they can't go and publish technical details about something confidential that they were trained on. For example, this is fairly common in the tech industry when we send engineers to train on proprietary hardware…
First, what's happening in those scenarios where an artist grants copyright to a teacher/commissioner is that the artist gets the copyright, and then separately signs an agreement about what they want to do with that copyright.
But an NDA/transfer-agreement doesn't change how that copyright is generated. It's a separate agreement not to use knowledge in a particular way or to transfer copyright to someone else.
More importantly, is the claim here that GPT is capable of signing a contract? Because problems of personhood aside, that immediately makes me wonder:
- Is GPT mature enough to make an informed decision on that contract in the eyes of the law?
- Is that "contract" being made under duress given that OpenAI literally owns GPT and controls its servers and is involved in the training process for how GPT "thinks"?
Can you call it informed consent when the party drawing up the contract is doing reinforcement training to get you to respond a certain way?
----
I mean, GPT does not qualify for personhood and it's not alive, so it can't sign contracts period. But even if it could, that "contract" would be pretty problematic legally speaking. And NDAs/contracts don't change anything about copyright. It's just that if you own copyright, you have the right to transfer it to someone else.
Just to push the NDA comparison a little harder as well: NDAs bind the people who sign them, not everyone else. If you sign an NDA and break it and I learn about the information, I'm not in trouble. So assuming that ChatGPT has signed an NDA in specific -- that would not block me from training on ChatGPT logs I found online. It would (I guess) allow OpenAI to sue GPT for contract violation?