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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

#371

Post by melenaboija »

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 using authored NYT articles is “stupid IP battles” and having to pay for the trained model with them is not stupid?

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

#372

Post by ngetchell »

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…

"probably the single most important development in human history" is the kind of hyperbole you'd only find here. Better than medicine, agriculture, electrification, or music? That point of view simply does not jive with what I see so far from AI. It has had little impact beyond filling the internet with low-effort content.

I feel like the crypto evangelists never got off the hype train. They just picked a new destination. I hope the NYT is compensated for the theft of their IP and hopefully more lawsuits follow.

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

#373

Post by tiahura »

jprete wrote: post #218
tiahura wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should Stranger Things have to pay Goonies and Steven King?

If they used copyrighted material or trademarks, they almost certainly _did_ pay the Goonies property rightholders and Stephen King for the privilege. Why would you think they didn't?

The writers were obviously trained on the copyrighted material of Goonies and Steven King, and there has never been any reporting that Netflix has paid those copyright holders. This isn't surprising because copyright violation requires copying.

My understanding is that GPT is a word probability lookup table based on a review of the training material. A statistical analysis of NYT is not copying.

And this doesn't even to look at whether fair use might apply. Since tabulating word frequencies isn't copying, GPT isn't violating anyone's copyright.

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

#374

Post by hackerlight »

lp4vn wrote: post #21

For me it's quite obvious that if you make a profit from an engine that has as an input copyrighted material, then you owe something to the owner of this copyrighted content. We have seen this same problem with artists claiming stable diffusion engines were using their art.

I think we're in a new paradigm and need to look at this differently. The end goal is to train models on all the output of humanity. Everyone will have contributed to it (artists, writers, coders on github... the people who taught the writers, the people who invented the English language, the people who created the daily events that were reported on, etc). We're better off letting ML companies free access to almost everything, while taxing the output. The bargain is "you took from everyone, so you give to everyone". This is probably a more win-win setup that respects the reality that it's really the public commons that is generating the value here.

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

#375

Post by aantix »

solardev wrote: post #369
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…

There's a few levels to this... Would it be more rigorous for AI to cite its sources? Sure, but the same could be said for humans too. Wikipedia editors, scholars, and scientists all still struggle with proper citations. NYT itself has been caught plagiarizing[1]. But that doesn't really solve the underlying issue here: That our copyright laws and monetization models predate the Internet and the ease of sharing/paywa…

Can you imagine spending decades of your life, studying skin cancer, only to have some $20/month ChatGPT index your latest findings and spit out generically to some subpar researcher:

"Here's how I would cure melanoma!" followed by your detailed findings. Zero mention of you.

F-that. Attribution, as best they can, is the least OpenAI can do as a service to humanity. It's a nod to all content creators that they have built their business off of.

Claiming knowledge without even acknowledging potential sources is gross. Solve it OpenAI.

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

#376

Post by soulofmischief »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #335
hackerlight wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't matter what is legal. It matters what is right. Society is about balancing the needs of the individual vs the collective. I have a hard time equating individual rights with the NYT and I know my general views on scraping public data and who I was rooting for in the LinkedIn case.

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

#377

Post by jncfhnb »

throwup238 wrote: post #348
jncfhnb wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is neutral though. That’s the whole point. You have to twist its arm with great intention to recreate specific things. Sufficient intention that it’s really on you at that point.

It’s not neutral if all the content is in the model, regardless of whether you had to twist its arm or not. What does that even mean with a piece of software? A printer is neutral because you have to send it all the data to print out a copy of copyrighted content. It doesn’t contain it inherently.

Well I’m callin you a liar, and I’m open to being proven wrong.

Show me a prompt that can produce the first paragraph of chapter 3 of the first Harry Potter book. Because i don’t think you can. I don’t think you can prove it’s “in” there, or retrieve it. And if you can’t do either of those things then I think it’s irrelevant to your claims.

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

#378

Post by Philpax »

aantix wrote: post #353
apantel wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That’s not the same thing. Perplexity is using an already-trained LLM to read those sources and synthesise a new result from them. This allows them to cite the sources used for generation.

LLM training sees these documents without context; it doesn’t know where they came from, and any such attribution would become part of the thing it’s trying to mimic.

It’s still largely an unsolved problem.

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

#379

Post by simonw »

aantix wrote: post #353
apantel wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's a different approach: they've implemented RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation, where the tool runs additional searches as part of answering a question.

ChatGPT Browse and Bing and Google Bard implement the same pattern.

RAG does allow for some citation, but it doesn't help with the larger problem of not being able to cite for answers provided by the unassisted language model.

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