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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

#351

Post by hutzlibu »

JCM9 wrote: post #149
hutzlibu wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB likewise.

Exactly. FB happily gives away their ML tech like Llama because what they really care about is the data that can be used to train/tune models. The ML bits are just a commodity and not really worth much (something a new wave of ML startups have yet to realize).

The open source community can improve the tech - and they can then use it on their huge amounts of text and image data.

Legal problems? Update TOS like usual(did they already?). Some might leave, most will stay.

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

#352

Post by cozzyd »

crazygringo wrote: post #139
mistrial9 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is in the legal complaint - they have ten examples of direct content. I think they got very skilled people to work on producing the evidence.

Ah thank you. The examples start on page 30. I wish they included the prompts they used, not just the output. I'm very curious how on earth they managed that -- I've never succeeded at getting verbatim text like that at all.

If they included the prompts, OpenAI would just patch them and say they fixed the problem.

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

#353

Post by aantix »

apantel wrote: post #341
aantix wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A neural net is not a database where the original source is sitting somewhere in an obvious place with a reference. A neural net is a black box of functions that have been automatically fit to the training data. There is no way to know what sources have been memorized vs which have made their mark by affecting other types of functions in the neural net.

It's possible. Perplexity.ai is trying to solve this problem.

E.g. "Japan's App Store antitrust case"

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/Japans-App-Store-GJNTsIOVSy...

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

#354

Post by pxoe »

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?

open source won't care. they'll just use data anyway.

closed/proprietary services that also monetize - there's a question whether it's "fair" to take and use data for free, and then basically resell access to it. the monetization aspect is the bigger rub than just data use.

(maybe it's worth noting again that "openai" is not really "open" and not the same as open source ai/ml.)

taking data, maybe it's data that's free to take, and then as freely distributing resulting work, that's really just fine. taking something for free (without distinction, maybe it's free, maybe it's supposed to stay free, maybe it's not supposed to be used like that, maybe it's copyrighted), and then just ignoring licenses/relicensing and monetizing without care, that's just a minefield.

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

#355

Post by InCityDreams »

jmyeet wrote: post #148

When the US entered WWI, they couldn't build a plane despite inventing them. They had to buy planes from the French. Why? The Wright Brothers patent war [1]. This led to Congress creating a patent pool for avionics that exists to this day. Honestly, I get this feeling about these lawsuits about using content to train LLMs. Think of it this way: in growing up and learning to read and getting an education you read any…

Not silly at all when you actually read the article -

"Photographing the Eiffel Tower at night is not illegal at all. Any individual can take photos and share them on social networks. But the situation is different for professionals. The Eiffel Tower's lighting and sparkling lights are protected by copyright, so professional use of images of the Eiffel Tower at night requires prior authorization and may be subject to a fee."

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

#356

Post by JW_00000 »

iandanforth wrote: post #180
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

Arguing whether it can is not a useful discussion. You can absolutely train a net to memorize and recite text. As these models get more powerful they will memorize more text. The critical thing is how hard is it to make them recite copyrighted works. Critically the question is, did the developers put reasonable guardrails in place to prevent it? If a person with a very good memory reads an article, they only violate…

> If a person with a very good memory reads an article, they only violate copyright if they write it out and share it, or perform the work publicly. If they have a reasonable understanding of the law they won't do so. However a malicious person could absolutely trick or force them to produce the copyrighted work. The blame in that case however is not on the person who read and recited the article but on the person who tricked them.

Is that really true? Also, what if the second person is not malicious? In the example of ChatGPT, the user may accidentally write a prompt that causes the model to recite copyrighted text. I don't think a judge will look at this through the same lens as you are.

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

#357

Post by aantix »

make3 wrote: post #340
aantix wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We're trying to solve AGI but can't solve sources/citations?

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

#358

Post by ethbr1 »

belter wrote: post #331
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 conf…

Would be fascinated to hear from someone inside on a throwaway, but my nearest experience is that corporate lawyers aren't stupid.

If there's legally-murky secret data sauce, it's firewalled from being easily seen in its entirety by anyone not golden-handcuffed to the company.

They may be able to train against it. They may be able to peek at portions of it. But no one is downloading-all.

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

#359

Post by apantel »

stronglikedan wrote: post #339
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.

The issue as I see it is that every bit of data that the model ingested in training has affected what the model _is_ and therefore every token of output from the model has benefited from every token of input. When you receive anything from an LLM, you are essentially receiving a customized digest of all the training data. The second issue is that it takes an enormous amount of training data to train a model. In order to enable users to extract ‘anything’ from the model, the model has to be trained on ‘everything’. So I think these models should be looked at as public goods that consume everything and can produce anything. To have to keep a paper trail on the ‘everything’ part (the input) and send a continuous little trickle of capital to all of the sources is missing the point. That’s like a person having to pay a little bit of money to all of their teachers and mentors and everyone they’ve learned from every time they benefit from what they learned.

OpenAI isn’t marching into the online news space and posting NY Times content verbatim in an effort to steal market share from the NY Times. OpenAI is in the business of turning ‘everything’ (input tokens) into ‘anything’ (output tokens). If someone manages to extract a preserved chunk of input tokens, that’s more like an interesting edge case of the model. It’s not what the model is in the business of doing.

Edit: typo

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

#360

Post by hotpotamus »

make3 wrote: post #344

I hate that this will likely be decided by a 75 years old judge that hasn't been close to a computer since getting his 15 years old grandson to fix his patience game

This attitude itself seems quite out of date in modern times. My dad is 70 and brought home a 486 in the 90's which was my first computer, and he didn't work in technology; the people who did got their computers about a decade before that. People can still be bad with tech, but the Greatest Generation (who were obviously first in line when they were handing out generation names) and Silent Generation are basically gone and on the way out respectively and were really the last ones who could use the excuse that they never learned them. Boomers might not have been born with the tech, but it was an important force in the world for the majority of their lives.
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