191–200 of 383 posts
> if a federal judge finds that OpenAI illegally copied The Times' articles to train its AI model, the court could order the company to destroy ChatGPT's dataset, forcing the company to recreate it using only work that it is authorized to use. I'd like to see it happening but it sounds unrealistic.
If I read 1000s of of NYT articles to improve my writing skills, add then write an article of my own, is that a copyright violation?
IANAL, but copyright protections are pretty much tied to content and format and not to the idea itself, with the intent of preventing (or putting a price on) the copying of original works. The Times will have a very hard time proving that their content is being re-marketed by OpenAI. Having a competing product based on your ideas. Compare: "Steve Jobs [was] a tyrant": https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/ste…
>The general way LLMs work do not preserve content in it's original form: the ideas they contain are extracted and clustered statistically - as a Is the way LLM work relevant? I can make a shitty script that has as input Microsoft proprietary code and as output something identical in purpose but the text is completely different, I would rename names with synonyms, swap some things around etc. I am not against AIs, my…
What ChatGPT produces under normal use is not more similar to the NYT source than any other article on the same topic.
Honestly, I think generative AI losing a massive copyright showdown is inevitable at this stage. It's extremely easy to get the latest generation of AIs to produce outputs that in many fields sans-AI would be trivially considered as IP infringement. While there are many interesting reasonable legal & technical arguments that it's not, the result completely undermines copyright protections regardless. If that's accept…
Or on the converse: if those industries are unviable without copyright protection, they could go away entirely. This is a plausible path to "drop copyright entirely", just like encryption was dropped as an export-controlled technology in the late 90s. (remember the 40-bit "international" SSL?) OpenAI etc. have huge amounts of money behind them, they very well have a fighting chance in court to defend their usage of s…
These creative industries include all of software development, music, TV, movies, books, media, art, etc. You do technically solve the problem of copyright by shutting all those down, but I'm not sure it's a solution anybody will vote for.
If you can come up with a serious alternative though, which can sustain those creative industries without requiring copyright, now is probably the best moment in all of history to seize the day and make that happen. There's going to be a big shake-up regardless, it's the perfect chance for alternative models.
Bear in mind that dropping copyright entirely doesn't just hurt Disney and Sony Music though - with no copyright the GPL and all other open-source licenses are unenforceable, anybody can copy & sell anybody else's art or design without permission, Spotify doesn't have to pay musicians even $0.01 any more, etc etc etc. It's not an easy problem.
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Consider a mega consulting firm with millions of von Neumann-like analysts. Together, they've processed the same vast data that LLMs have, but individually, none could. It's not an LLM, but its purpose is like ChatGPT: assisting clients with their tasks. If LLMs concern you due to their data processing, would a firm like this do the same?
Bringing up poor fitting analogies won't change my opinion.
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Well if use the tool to reproduce copyrighted content you are violating copyright. But that’s not the primary usecase and nobody in their right mind is arguing that. The weights are not a reproduction of the content. They are capable of it but so is a photocopier a lot more and we didn’t ban those either despite them technically being a lot more useful for violation. Nah, this is expansionist doctrine and agenda for…
Photocopiers are for personal use, training an AI is not. If you photocopy 10,000 copies of copyrighted text and starting distributing it you will get sued. It would be different if I trained my own AI, for my personal use.
Again, LLMs don’t copy so it’s not a good metaphor.
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Or at least ask before scrapping/reading it.
If it’s on the open internet then why should they have to do that? How is openai training on articles fundamentally different from the wayback machine storing them? They’re just getting stored in a different form.
IANAL, but copyright protections are pretty much tied to content and format and not to the idea itself, with the intent of preventing (or putting a price on) the copying of original works. The Times will have a very hard time proving that their content is being re-marketed by OpenAI. Having a competing product based on your ideas. Compare: "Steve Jobs [was] a tyrant": https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/ste…
Not-A-Lawyer NAL instead of the full IANAL.
I just had to say it.
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100% this. But I doubt it will happen in the US, unfortunately.
The tech industry has sufficient money and influence for lobbying to push this one through. The media industry did the DMCA adjustments to copyright reasonably fast, and tech industry is even more powerful and wealthy.
I think when this happens it is normally easier to block a law than to push it through, so I expect the current laws will remain for the short/medium term.
The current legal requirement to get clearance for all samples only arose after a bunch of court cases in the late 80s/ early 90s, mostly involving quite obscure musicians.
There are a lot of people on here who assume that ‘logic will prevail’ in the courts on questions like use of copyrighted data in training data. History shows that this really isn’t a safe assumption. The courts have historically been extremely favorable to copyright holders. It would be foolish to underestimate the legal risk to openai et al here