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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

#331

Post by belter »

kbos87 wrote: 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…

For all the leaks on: Secret projects, novelty training algorithms not being published anymore so as to preserve market share, custom hardware, Q* learning, internal politics at companies at the forefront of state of the art LLMs...A thunderous silence is the lack of leaks, on the exact datasets used to train the main commercial LLMs.

It is clear OpenAI or Google did not use only Common Crawl. With so many press conferences why did no research journalist ask yet from OpenAI or Google to confirm or deny if they use or used LibGen?

Did OpenAI really bought an ebook of every publication from Cambridge Press, Oxford Press, Manning, APress, and so on? Did any of investors due diligence, include researching the legality of the content used for training?

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

#332

Post by naltroc »

pavlov wrote: post #22
batch12 wrote: post #3

> The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over claims the companies built their AI models by “copying and using millions” of the publication’s articles and now “directly compete” with the outlet’s content. Millions? Damn, they can churn out some content. 13 million[0]!. [0] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter... .

The NYT publishes about 200 pieces of journalism every day (according to their own website), and it was founded in 1851. That makes for a lot of articles.

Copyright in the US persists for 70 years after the publisher's death.

So the earliest available copyrighted material would be all content published by anybody who died in the year 1953 or earlier.

If the author of an article published in 1950 still has a living author, the work is still copyrighted.

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

#333

Post by jrajav »

dantheman wrote: post #298
cudgy wrote: 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...

This is a little ridiculous. There are flaws with copyright law but making money from creative work would be even less viable than it is now if there were no disincentives at all to blatant plagiarism and repackaging right after initial creation.

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

#335

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

hackerlight wrote: post #317
kbos87 wrote: 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?

It doesn't matter what's good for open source ML.

It matters what is legal and what makes sense.

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

#336

Post by solardev »

charonn0 wrote: post #320
solardev wrote: post #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…

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

They'd probably have a different business model, like selling clickbait articles written by AI with sex and controversy galore.

I'm not saying AI is better for journalism than NYT reporters, just that it's more important.

Journalism has been in trouble for decades, sadly -- and I say that as a journalism minor in college. Trump gave the papers a brief respite, but the industry continues to die off, consolidate, etc. We probably need a different business model altogether. My vote is just for public funding with independent watchdogs, i.e. states give counties money to operate newspapers with citizen watchdog groups/boards. Maaaaybe there's room for "premium" niche news like 404 Media/The Information/Foreign Affairs/National Review/etc., but that remains to be seen. If the NYT paywall doesn't keep them alive, I doubt this lawsuit will.

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

#337

Post by blovescoffee »

wg0 wrote: post #123

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 n…

People thinking to dismiss this should, period. Consider that Open AI and similar companies are the only ones in the AI space with the market cap to build out profitable hardware projects which open source can't. Or maybe every investor is just dumb and likes throwing millions of dollars away so they can participate in a hype train.

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

#338

Post by c22 »

dwringer wrote: post #37
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'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 don't understand this argument. You seem to be implying that I could freely copy and distribute other people's works without commiting copyright infringement as long as I make the resulting product somehow less compelling than the original? (Maybe I print it in a hard-to-read typeface or smear some feces on the copy.)

I have seen low fidelity copies of motion pictures recorded by a handheld camera in a theater that I'm pretty sure most would qualify as infringing. The copied product is no doubt inferior, but still competes on price and convenience.

If someone does not wish to pay to read the New York Times then perhaps accepting the risk of non-perfect copies made by a LLM is an acceptable trade off for them to save a dime.

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

#339

Post by stronglikedan »

solardev wrote: post #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…

Why shouldn't the creators of the training content get anything for their efforts? With some guiderails in place to establish what is fair compensation, Fair Use can remain as-is.

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

#340

Post by make3 »

aantix wrote: post #327
solardev wrote: post #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…

Why can't AI at least cite its source? This feels like a broader problem, nothing specific to the NYTimes. Long term, if no one is given credit for their research, either the creators will start to wall off their content or not create at all. Both options would be sad. A humane attribution comment from the AI could go a long way - "I think I read something about this in the NYTimes on January 3rd, 2021." It appears t…

"Why can't AI at least cite its source" each article seen alters the weights a tiny, non-human understandable amount. it doesn't have a source, unless you think of the whole humongous corpus that it is trained on
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