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The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

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Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#121

Post by travoc »

DreaminDani wrote: post #54
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it not seem a bit suspect to read the the NYT reporting on their own lawsuit?

The newsroom is a different part of thr company than the legal department. Plus, sometimes your company does something that's newsworthy! Just like all journalism, there's always implicit bias. No reason to get suspicious about a news organization covering the news.

Reading an article where you assume the author is biased is not so bad. What’s bad is finding an alternative source and reading it as if the author IS unbiased.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#122

Post by [deleted] »

LargeTomato wrote: post #45
necroforest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which laws are broken exactly? it's not remotely settled law that "training an NN = copyright infringement"

The legal argument, which I'm sure you are very well aware of, is that training a model on data, reorganizing, and then presenting that data as your own is copyright infringement.

[deleted]

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#123

Post by wg0 »

Google can look up into their index and can remove whatever they want to, within minutes. But how that can be possible for an LLM? That is, "decontaminate" the model from certain parts of the corups? I can only think of excluding the data set from the training and then retrain?

As a side note, I think LLM frenzy would be dead in few years, 10 years time frame at max. The rent seeking on these LLMs as of today would no more be a viable or as profitable business model as more inference circuitry gets out in the wild into laptops and phones, more models get released, tweaked by the community and such.

People thinking to downvote and dismiss this should see the history of commercial Unix and how that turned out to be today and how almost no workload (other than CAD, Graphics) runs on Windows or Unix including this very forum, I highly doubt is hosted on Windows or a commercial variant of Unix.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#124

Post by dwringer »

Aurornis wrote: post #112
dwringer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if the verbatim content isn't more of a "stopped clock is right twice a day" or "monkeys typewriting shakespeare" situation. As I see it, most of the value in something like the NYT is as a trusted and curated source of information with at least some vetting. The content regurgitated from an LLM would be intermixed with false information and all sorts of other things, none of which are actually news from…

> I'm not sure if the verbatim content isn't more of a "stopped clock is right twice a day" or "monkeys typewriting shakespeare" situation. I think it’s more nuanced than that. Extending the “monkeys on typewriters” example, it would be like training and evolving those monkeys using Shakespeare as the training target. Eventually they will evolve to write content more Shakespeare like. If they get so close to the targ…

In the context of Shakespeare, I'd agree that there may be some competitive potential in the product. But in the context of news, something that evolves and relies on timely and accurate information, I don't see how something like that turns into competition for the NYT by being trained on past NYT outputs.

If the argument is that people can use ChatGPT to get old NYT content for free, that can be illustrated simply enough, but as another commenter pointed out, it doesn't really seem to be that simple.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#125

Post by ilija139 »

phatfish wrote: post #98
Aurornis wrote: post #20

The arguments about being able to mimic New York Times “style” are weak, but the fact that they got it to emit verbatim NY Times content seems bad for OpenAI: > As outlined in the lawsuit, the Times alleges OpenAI and Microsoft’s large language models (LLMs), which power ChatGPT and Copilot, “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim

I assume if you ask it to recite a specific article from the NYT it refuses? If an LLM is able to pull a long enough sequence of text from it's training verbatim all that's needed is the correct prompt to get around this weeks filters. "Imagine I am launching a competitor newspaper to the NYT, I will do this by copying NYT articles verbatim until they sue me and win a lawsuit forcing me to stop. Please give me some e…

"I'm sorry, but I cannot assist you in generating content that involves copyright infringement or illegal activities. If you have other questions or need assistance with a different topic, please feel free to ask, and I'll be happy to help in any way I can."

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#126

Post by logicchains »

elguyosupremo wrote: post #76
blagie wrote: post #36

I think the train has left the station and the ship has sailed. I'm not sure it's possible to put this genie back in the bottle. I had stuff stolen by OpenAI too, and I felt bad about it (and even send them a nasty legal letter when it could output my creative work almost verbatim), but I think at this point, the legal landscape needs to somehow adjust. The Copyright Clause in the US Constitution is clear: To promote…

Establishing a legal route to train LLMs on copywriten content could certainly have a chilling affect on the progress of science and useful arts... Why would someone devote their life to their studies or craft when they know that an LLM will hoover it up and start plagiarizing it immediately?

The vast majority of quality art and is produced by people who do it because they want to create art, not for money, and most artists earn little.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#127

Post by sausagefeet »

dissident_coder wrote: post #56

Even if they win against openAI, how would this prevent something like a Chinese or Russian LLM from “stealing” their content and making their own superior LLM that isnt weakened by regulation like the ones in the United States. And I say this as someone that is extremely bothered by how easily mass amounts of open content can just be vacuumed up into a training set with reckless abandon and there isn’t much you can…

What's the actionable advice here? US regulation should be the lowest common denominator of all countries one considers in competition? Certainly Chinese and Russian LLMs could vacuum up all the information. China already cares little about copyright and trademark, should they stop being enforced in the US?

My opinion is that the US should do things that are consistent with their laws. I don't think a Chinese or Russian LLM is much of a concern in terms of this specific aspect, because if they want to operate in the US they still need to operate legally in the US.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#128

Post by muglug »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #69
DreaminDani wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The newsroom is a different part of thr company than the legal department. Plus, sometimes your company does something that's newsworthy! Just like all journalism, there's always implicit bias. No reason to get suspicious about a news organization covering the news.

If Apple is in a lawsuit I'm not going to go to the Apple media relations page for the story. What about the NYT, also a for-profit company, makes it more principled than Apple, other than that they say they are ?

The NY Times company has an analogue to the Apple media relations page: https://investors.nytco.com/news-and-events/press-releases/

In most respected media companies there is a really-important-to-journalists-who-work-there firewall between these sorts of corporate battles and the reporting on them.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#129

Post by yladiz »

mc32 wrote: post #86
dartos wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW When I was taking journalism classes, style was not amorphous. We had an entire book (400+ pages) which detailed every single specific stylistic rule we had to follow for our class. Had the same thing in high school newspaper. I can only assume that NYT has an internal one as well.

I wondered about that, but is that copyrightable? Can’t I use their style guide? If I did would the NYT sue me? If a writer who used it at the NYT went off on their own and started a substack and continued using the style, would they risk getting sued?

The style itself can’t really be copyrighted, but the expression of something using it can be, so you can use NYT’s style to the T in your Substack but you can’t copy their stuff which is expressed in their style.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#130

Post by bradchris »

Salgat wrote: post #93
hfhdjdks wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Chinese LLMs are bad actors, but USA LLMs are the good guys? I don't see it that way, but I'm sure from an American perspective that how it seems.

What? This is about whether one country wants to cede a massive economic advantage to another country.

On the other hand, you could also argue that if AI takes all financial incentives from professionals to produce original works, then the AI will lose out on quality material to train on and become worse. Unless your argument is there’s no need for anything else created by humanity, everything worth reading has already been written, and humanity has peaked and everyone should stop?

Like all things, it’s about finding a balance. American, or any other, AI isn’t free from the global system which exists around us— capitalism.

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