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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

#411

Post by layer8 »

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.

Presumably, if a passage of any significant length is cited verbatim (or almost verbatim), there would have been a way to track that source through the weights.

The issue of replicating a style is probably more difficult.

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

#412

Post by _jal »

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…

I hope this results in OpenAI's code being released to everyone. This is way more important to humanity's future than any single software company. If OpenAI goes under, a dozen other outfits can replace them.

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

#413

Post by denton-scratch »

ethanbond wrote: post #216
Zambyte wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh thank goodness we can rely on charity for our information economy You seem to be assuming an "information economy" should exist at all. Can you justify that?

Yep! I like having access to high-quality information and producing, collecting, editing, and publishing that is not free. Much of it is only cost-effective to produce if you can share it with a massive audience, I.e. sure if I want to read a great investigative piece on the corruption of a Supreme Court Justice I can hypothetically commission one, but in practice it seems much much better to allow people to have bus…

> that is not free

Why did you specify that this stuff you like, you only like if it's "not free"?

The hidden assumption is that the information you like wouldn't be made available unless someone was paying for it. But that's not in evidence; a lot of information and content is provided to the public due to other incentives: self-promotion, marketing, or just plain interest.

Would you prefer not to have access to Wikipedia?

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

#414

Post by collaborative »

So the NYT wants its content to be indexed by search engines, therefore makes it public to all crawlers, but then complains when some crawlers use the content to train AI on it? This issue is about the NYT wanting to lure internet users into its biased and politically motivated news website (and make them pay for it). If the NYT wants to they can block crawlers and rely on loyal readers typing nytimes.com in the browser. Easy. But competing is hard. It was easier when they could just control shelf space in kiosks

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

#415

Post by alfiedotwtf »

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…

Why isn't robots.txt enough to enforce copyright etc? If NYT didn't set robots.txt properly, is their content free-for-all? Yes I know the first answer you would jump to is "of course not, copyright is the default", but it's almost 2024 and we have had robots.txt as industry de jure to stop crawling.

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

#416

Post by cogman10 »

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…

We all remember when Aaron Swartz got hit with a wire tapping and intent to distribute federal crime for downloading JSTR stuff right?

It's really disgusting, IMO, that corporations that go above and beyond that sort of behavior are seeing NO federal investigations for this sort of behavior. Yet a private citizen does it and it's threats of life in prison.

This isn't new, but it speaks to a major hole in our legal system and the administration of it. The Feds are more than willing to steamroll an individual but will think twice over investigating a large corporation engaged in the same behavior.

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

#417

Post by dkrich »

ngetchell wrote: post #372
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 destina…

Also the assumption a publication that’s been around for 150 years is disposable, not the web application that was created a year ago. I’ve been saying for a while that people’s credulity and impulse to believe absolutely any storyline related to technology is off the charts.

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

#418

Post by denton-scratch »

tsimionescu wrote: post #266
politician wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without 200 years of copyright protection, how will any author be able to afford food?

The fact that copyright protection is far too long is entirely separate from the need for some kind of copyright protection to exist at all. All evidence suggests that it's completely impossible to live off your work unless you copyright it for some reasonable period, with the possible exception of performance art (music, theater, ballet). A writer or journalist just can't make money if any huge company can package t…

> All evidence suggests that it's completely impossible to live off your work unless you copyright it for some reasonable period

Which evidence?

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

#419

Post by KHRZ »

pxoe wrote: post #370
make3 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

that just sounds like "we didn't even try to build those systems in that way, and we're all out of ideas, so it basically will never work" which is really just a very, very common story with ai problems, be it sources/citations/licenses/usage tracking/etc., it's all just 'too complex if not impossible to solve', which just seems like a facade for intentionally ignoring those problems for benefit at this point. those…

Just a question, do you remember a source for all the knowledge in your mind, or did you at least try to remember?

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

#420

Post by awwaiid »

solardev wrote: post #394
stronglikedan wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone learns from papers. That's the point of them, isn't it? Except we pay, what, $4 per Sunday paper or $10/mo for the digital edition? Why should a robot have to pay much more just because it's better at absorbing information?

That would be a funny settlement -- "OK, so $10/month, and we'll go back to 1950 to be fair, so that'll be .... $8760"
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