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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

#611

Post by whichfawkes »

voltaireodactyl wrote: post #597
whichfawkes wrote: post #588

It seems weird to sue an AI company because their tool "can recite [copyrighted]" content verbatim. If I paid a human to recite the whole front page of the New York Times to me, they could probably do it. There's nothing infringing about that. However, if I videotape them reciting the front page of the New York Times and start selling that video, then I 'd be infringing on the copyright. The guy that I paid to tell m…

In your analogy, AI would be the videotape, not the person, because OpenAI is selling access to it.

I'm not so sure about that. It seems to me that they're selling me a service. Just like I might pay for a subscription to Adobe Photoshop or pay per-render fees to a rendering farm.

I could use Photoshop to reproduce a copyrighted work, and in some circumstances (i.e. personal use) that'd be fine. Or I could use Photoshop to reproduce a copyrighted work and try to sell it for profit, which would clearly not be fine. Nobody is saying that Adobe has to recognize whether or not the pixels I'm editing constitute a copyrighted work or not.

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

#612

Post by benrow »

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…

Google have their "Machine Unlearning" challenge to address this specific issue - removing the influence of given training data without retraining from scratch. Seems like a hard problem. https://blog.research.google/2023/06/announcing-first-machin...

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

#613

Post by MeImCounting »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #601

I have deeply mixed feelings about the way LLMs slurp up copyrighted content and regurgitate it as something "new." As a software developer who has dabbled in machine learning, it is exciting to see the field progress. But I am also an author with a large catalog of writings, and my work has been captured by at least one LLM (according to a tool that can allegedly detect these things). Overall, current LLMs remind me…

Ehh LLMs have become a fundamental part of my work flow as a professional. GPT4 is absolutely capable of providing links to sources and citations. It is more reliable than most human teachers I have had and doesnt have an ego about its incorrect statements when challenged on them. It does become less useful as you get more technical or niche but its incredibly useful for learning in new areas or increasing the breadth of your knowledge on a subject.

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

#614

Post by LargeTomato »

professor_x wrote: post #270
LargeTomato wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal argument, which I'm sure you are very well aware of, is that training a model on data, reorganizing, and then presenting that data as your own is copyright infringement.

I don't think OP is arguing in bad faith.The fact is it's unclear what laws this legal argument is supported by.

Agreed, it is unclear. It's also a very commonly discussed issue with generative AI and there's been a significant amount of buzz around this. Is the NYT testing the legal waters? Maybe. Will this case set precedent? Yes. Is this a silly, random, completely unhinged case to bring?

No.

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

#615

Post by cjbprime »

MeImCounting wrote: post #613
DamnInteresting wrote: post #601

I have deeply mixed feelings about the way LLMs slurp up copyrighted content and regurgitate it as something "new." As a software developer who has dabbled in machine learning, it is exciting to see the field progress. But I am also an author with a large catalog of writings, and my work has been captured by at least one LLM (according to a tool that can allegedly detect these things). Overall, current LLMs remind me…

Ehh LLMs have become a fundamental part of my work flow as a professional. GPT4 is absolutely capable of providing links to sources and citations. It is more reliable than most human teachers I have had and doesnt have an ego about its incorrect statements when challenged on them. It does become less useful as you get more technical or niche but its incredibly useful for learning in new areas or increasing the breadt…

> GPT4 is absolutely capable of providing links to sources and citations.

Do you mean in the Browsing Mode or something? I don't think it is naturally capable of that, both because it is performing lossy compression, and because in many cases it simply won't know where the text that was fed to it during training came from.

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

#616

Post by crazygringo »

PokemonNoGo wrote: post #496
crazygringo wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in a lawsuit, there's very much the question of intent as well. If OpenAI never meant to allow copyrighted material to be reproduced, shut it down immediately when it was discovered, and the NYT can't show any measurable level of harm (e.g. nobody was unsubscribing from NYT because of ChatGPT)... then the NYT may have a very hard time winning this suit based specifically on the copyright argument.

Intent isn't some magic way to claim innocence. Here negligence is very much at play. Were OpenAI negligent when they made the NYT articles available like this?

Sure, but even negligence may be hard to show here.

It's very clear that OpenAI couldn't predict all of the ways users could interact with its model, as we quickly saw things like prompt discovery and prompt injections happening.

And so not only is it reasonable that OpenAI didn't know users would be able to retrieve snippets of training material verbatim, it's reasonable to say they weren't negligent in not knowing either. It's a new technology that wasn't meant to operate like that. It's not that different from a security vulnerability that quickly got patched once discovered.

Negligence is about not showing reasonable care. That's going to be very hard to prove.

And it's not like people started using ChatGPT as a replacement for the NYT. Even in a lawsuit over negligence, you have to show harm. I think the NYT will be hard pressed to show they lost a single subscriber.

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

#617

Post by tsimionescu »

Tao3300 wrote: post #515
dlandis wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But if it's possible for the neural net to memorize passages of text then surely it could also memorize where it got those passages of text from. Perhaps not with today's exact models and technology, but if it was a requirement then someone would figure out a way to do it.

Neural nets don't memorize passages of text. They train on vectorized tokens. You get a model of how language statistically works, not understanding and memory.

The model weights clearly encode certain full passages of text, otherwise it would be virtually impossible for the network to produce verbatim copies of text. The format is something very vaguely like "the most likely token after "call" is "me"; the most likely token after "call me" is "Ishmael". It's ultimately a kind of lossy statistical compression scheme at some level.

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

#618

Post by lelanthran »

aragonite wrote: post #404
JCM9 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. In what sense are they claiming their generated contents as their own IP? https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-the-code-if-chatgpts-... > OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) does not claim ownership of generated content. According to their terms of service, "OpenAI hereby assig…

> In what sense are they claiming their generated contents as their own IP?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-the-code-if-chatgpts-...

>> OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) does not claim ownership of generated content. According to their terms of service, "OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output."

How are they giving you the rights to the work if they don't own it? They are literally asserting that they are in a position to assign the rights (to the output) to the user - that is a literal claim of ownership.

IOW, if someone says "Take this from me, I assure you it is legal to do so", they are asserting ownership of that thing.

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

#619

Post by photonthug »

ahepp wrote: post #583
photonthug wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the metadata (metaknowledge?) would be larger than the knowledge itself. Because URLs are usually as long as the writing they point at?

I’m not an expert in AI training, but I don’t think it’s as simple as storing writing. It does seem to be possible to get the system to regurgitate training material verbatim in some cases, but my understanding is that the text is generated probabilistically. It seems like a very difficult engineering challenge to provide attribution for content generated by LLMs, while preserving the traits that make them more usefu…

Sure, it's a hard problem, but as others have pointed out frequently in this thread.. there is not only "no incentive" to solve it but a clear disincentive. If one can say where the data comes from, one might have to prove that it was used only with permission. And the reason why it's a hard problem is not related to metadata volume being greater than content volume. Clearly a book title/year published is usually shorter than book contents.

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

#620

Post by DeIlliad »

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…

> 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.

Easy to grandstand when it is not your job on the line.

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