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New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

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Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#241

Post by wilsynet »

zlg_codes wrote: post #190
pimterry wrote: post #113

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…

Ruling in favor of copyright will call into question search engines and the like as well. Do you think Bing or Google are going to negotiate copying rights with the world's websites? LLMs are proving that intellectual property has a bunch of holes in it. It's been unstable ground to defend since day one. Upon what principle should we believe that one can own an idea and all performances or derivatives of it? Patents…

As previously said, search engines index and provide links. I’ll add that it constitutes fair use because a search engine isn’t itself a replacement for the articles that it indexes.

But ChatGPT is actually providing an alternative that obviates the original articles themselves.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#242

Post by thrwayaistartup »

acka wrote: post #169
q87b wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human is not a machine.

Philosophical Mechanism and other philosophical views with Cartesianist roots would beg to differ.

Laws are certainly up for philosophical debate, but at least in the USA, that debate typically has to happen in the legislature rather than the judiciary.

More importantly, though, most judges are not philosophers.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#243

Post by [deleted] »

buildbot wrote: post #55
rurp wrote: post #49

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that LLMs might lead to the end of the open web, or at least a drastically reduced version of it. So much of these model's utility is in directly competing with the producers of the training data. Content creators and aggregators are seeing more and more reason to restrict and limit access, to avoid having AI companies consume all of their data and then be the ones making mon…

No it's the death of the corporate content hosting web - the open web was never about making money with your blog post/irc chat/usenet group/etc content, at least in my opinion. Let data be free! If someone wants to use it to make money, well, it's open, just like open source. It's still not okay to take open source work and claim it as your own, which is what copyright should be limited to. Stealing a photo or plagi…

[deleted]

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#244

Post by wilsynet »

ojosilva wrote: post #159

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 NYT argument is going to be that they put up a site, own the copyright for their content and make that content available for either a human to read it for themselves, or software to index for something commonly understood as a search engine. Those terms do not entitle the training of LLMs for commercial use. Therefore, cease and desist. Oh and destroy anything that was created by violating the terms of our license.

You can make arguments like a) what is ChatGPT but a different kind of search engine, or b) what is an LLM but a primitive human, or c) but but uhh we didn’t agree to these terms.

But I do not think those arguments will prevail.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#245

Post by malcolmgreaves »

pimterry wrote: post #113

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…

> AI consuming copyrighted data and producing an output has to be considered a derivative work (or indeed, the model itself will be considered a derivative work) or IP protections are effectively broken.

It’s not derivative work though. First, a human didn’t create it, so copyright protections don’t exist on its output. Machines don’t enjoy copyright protections, people do.

It’s mechanically copying and reproducing part of its input data set. Making a tool that regurgitates others’ copyrighted IP is going to been seen as aiding mass copyright violations. Exactly like how Napster got sued: they’re holding a bunch of material they shouldn’t be. The only new twist to this case is the data is encoded in a transformer’s weights. This should be correctly seen as the same as having encrypted copyrighted data using a lossy algorithm.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#246

Post by ndriscoll »

gorkempacaci wrote: post #167
ojosilva wrote: post #159

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…

I tend to agree with you, but, one could argue “statistical collection of words” is a form of compression? For example, you can’t write a kids version of a novel and sell that without dealing with copyright.

The model is a model. It's part of a compression algorithm. The compressed data would be the prompt + choice of which predicted tokens to accept (e.g. when not always choosing the most likely next token). The end-user is supplying the prompt and the choice function is randomized/not being used to store data, thus the end user is providing the compressed data.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#247

Post by malcolmgreaves »

Pannoniae wrote: post #182
pimterry wrote: post #113

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…

You’ve ironically stumbled upon thenphilosocial argument in favor of copyright! We do want these industries to exist. Without copyright protection in a world of zero effort reproduction, it becomes impossible to make a living this way. This the industries cease to exist. And people stop crafting anything other than the most dogshit of media and programs and writing. If you have to work a different job all day, you’re gonna have no time to make that next good song/video/etc.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#248

Post by simion314 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #238
simion314 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> my opinion is that if your AI uses GPL code the output should be GPL If I use Inkscape is the output of my drawing subject to the same terms as Inkscape? If I use a Photoshop filter is the output subject to Photoshop's EULA and/or the copyright of the photo I started with?

If I use a Photoshop filter is the output subject to Photoshop's EULA and/or the copyright of the photo I started with?

If you get my image from the internet then you resize it in Photoshop you can't claim you created some original art, you just used the resize/crop/color filter function.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#249

Post by malcolmgreaves »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #220
pimterry wrote: post #113

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…

>>"If you do allow that, the many many affected industries have catastrophic problems." That is the problem. Technically, AI should be allowed to 'read' content, it isn't hidden, and it gets mixed with other content in a 'brain' like thing. AI and Humans can both spit out a new product that is 'similar' and thus be sued on that similarity. But it can also produce endless similar variations at low cost and fast. It is…

There’s an unbelievably vast difference between a human’s creative process and the mechanical reproduction of reweighed training data. Machines don’t create, people do.

Re: New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

#250

Post by simion314 »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #192
simion314 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I don't think the process matters much, but your proposed script would output something that was obviously very similar to the original. What ChatGPT produces under normal use is not more similar to the NYT source than any other article on the same topic.

>What ChatGPT produces under normal use is not more similar to the NYT source than any other article on the same topic.

ChatGPT is doing what a smart student does when he copies the homework, he combines a few sources and changes some wording. Technically there is no creativity, it is interpolating it's inputs and there is some randomness thrown in.

We also know that ChatGPT put some filters to filter out copyrighted outputs after they were caught that the AI actually memorizes paragraphs of text word by word.

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