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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

#311
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you study copyrighted material for four years at a university and then go on to earn money based on your education, do you owe something to the authors of your text books? I'm not sure how we should treat LLMs with respect to publicly accessible but copyrighted material, but it seems clear to me that "profiting" from copyrighted material isn't a sufficient criteria to cause me to "owe something to the owner".

We don’t, and shouldn’t, give LLMs the same rights as people.

this seems so obvious and yet people miss it.

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

#313
I hope this results in Fair Use being expanded to cover AI training. This is way more important to humanity's future than any single media outlet. If the NYT goes under, a dozen similar outlets can replace them overnight. If we lose AI to stupid IP battles in its infancy, we end up handicapping probably the single most important development in human history just to protect some ancient newspaper. Then another country is going to do it anyway, and still the NYT is going to get eaten.

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

#314
post #170

Solidly rooting for NYT on this - it’s felt like many creative organizations have been asleep at the wheel while their lunch gets eaten for a second time (the first being at the birth of modern search engines.) I don’t necessarily fault OpenAI’s decision to initially train their models without entering into licensing agreements - they probably wouldn’t exist and the generative AI revolution may never have happened if…

It’s likely fair use.

Playing back large passages of verbatim content sold as your “product” without citation is almost certainly not fair use. Fair use would be saying “The New York Times said X” and then quoting a sentence with attribution. Thats not what OpenAI is being sued for. They’re being sued for passing off substantial bits of NYTimes content as their own IP and then charging for it saying it’s their own IP.

This is also related to earlier studies about OpenAI where their models have a bad habit of just regurgitating training data verbatim. If your trained data is protected IP you didn’t secure the rights for then that’s a real big problem. Hence this lawsuit. If successful, the floodgates will open.

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

#315

[dead]

And Napster is long since gone, replaced by streaming services that pay (very little) to content creators. I expect the ML stuff go the same way.

OpenAI is separated from MS because they can claim openAI is "research" and thus claim "research" exemption for fair use in copyright law.

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

#316
post #234

And here I am thinking it'd be amazing to have an AI that can on-demand read me every novel ever written. It'd be even cooler to jump into a text adventure game of any novel and have it actually follow the original text. I guess that clashes with our copyright world. (Is there hope of some kind of Netflix/Spotify model, with fractional royalties?)

"I want a red boat. My neighbor has a blue boat. It would be cool if I took my neighbor's boat and made it red."

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

#317
post #170

Solidly rooting for NYT on this - it’s felt like many creative organizations have been asleep at the wheel while their lunch gets eaten for a second time (the first being at the birth of modern search engines.) I don’t necessarily fault OpenAI’s decision to initially train their models without entering into licensing agreements - they probably wouldn’t exist and the generative AI revolution may never have happened if…

Doesn't this harm open source ML by adding yet another costly barrier to training models?

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

#318

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

Sarah Silverman is claiming the same thing about her book. But I've tried really hard to get ChatGPT to output sentences verbatim from her book and just can't get it to. In fact, I can't even get it to answer simple questions about facts that are in her book but nowhere else -- it just says it doesn't know. Similarly I haven't been able to reproduce any text in the NYT verbatim unless it's part of a common quote or p…

They could have changed it to not do this after getting sued.

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

#319
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Critically the question is, did the developers put reasonable guardrails in place to prevent it? Why? If I steal a bunch of unique works of art and store them in my house for only me to see, am I still committing a crime?

violating copyright is not stealing - it's a government granted monopoly...

Taking an original "one of one" piece from a museum without permission and hanging it up in your livingroom isn't exactly copyright infringement though, is it?

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

#320

I hope this results in Fair Use being expanded to cover AI training. This is way more important to humanity's future than any single media outlet. If the NYT goes under, a dozen similar outlets can replace them overnight. If we lose AI to stupid IP battles in its infancy, we end up handicapping probably the single most important development in human history just to protect some ancient newspaper. Then another country…

If the NYT goes under, why would its replacement fare any better?
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