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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

#631

Post by asylteltine »

solardev wrote: post #324
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?

Yes... because you're stealing? But if you simply copied the unique works and stored them, nobody would care. If you then tried to turn around and sell the copies, well, the artist is probably dead anyway and the art is probably public domain, but if not, then yeah it'd be copyright infringement. If you only copied tiny parts of the art though, then fair use examinations in a court might come into play. It just depen…

Yes and OpenAI sells its copies as a subscription, so that’s at least copyright infringement if not theft.

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

#632

Post by photonthug »

tsimionescu wrote: post #617
Tao3300 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's ultimately a kind of lossy statistical compression scheme at some level.

And on this subject, it seems worthwhile to note that compression has never freed anyone from copyright/piracy considerations before. If I record a movie with a cell phone at a worse quality, that doesn't change things. If a book is copied and stored in some gzipped format where I can only read a page at a time, or only read a random page at a time, I don't think that's suddenly fair-use.

Not saying these things are exactly the same as what LLMs do, but it's worth some thought, because how are we going to make consistent rules that apply in one case but not the other?

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

#633

Post by hackerlight »

notahacker wrote: post #544
soulofmischief wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have an even harder time equating individual rights with the spending of $xx billion in Azure compute time and payment of a collective $0 to millions of individuals who involuntarily contribute training material to create a closed source, commercial service allowing a single company to compete with all the individuals currently employed to create similar work. NYT just happens to be an entity that can afford to fig…

I don't see a problem as long as there's taxation.

Look at SpaceX. They paid a collective $0 to the individuals who discovered all the physics and engineering knowledge. Without that knowledge they're nothing. But still, aren't we all glad that SpaceX exists?

In exchange for all the knowledge that SpaceX is privatizing, we get to tax them. "You took from us, so we get to take it back with tax."

I think the more important consideration isn't fairness it's prosperity. I don't want to ruin the gravy train with IP and copyright law. Let them take everything, then tax the end output in order to correct the balance and make things right.

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

#634

Post by belter »

logicchains wrote: post #628
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…

> I do think they should quickly course correct at this point and accept the fact that they clearly owe something to the creators of content they are consuming. Eventually these LLMs are going to be put in mechanical bodies with the ability to interact with the world and learn (update their weights) in realtime. Consider how absurd your perspective would be then, when it'd be illegal for this embodied LLM to read any…

A human faces the same restriction, if it provides commercial services on the internet creating code that is a copy of copyrighted code.

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

#635

Post by MeImCounting »

cjbprime wrote: post #615
MeImCounting wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#636

Post by gosub100 »

joquarky wrote: post #457
bbkane wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters what ends up being best for humanity, and I think there are cases to be made both ways on this

People often get buried in the weeds about the purpose of copyright. Let us not forget that the only reason copyright laws exist is > To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries If copyright is starting to impede rather than promote progress, then it needs to change to remain constitutional.

Copyright isn't what got in the way here. AI could have negotiated a license agreement with the rights holder. But they chose not to.

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

#637

Post by seanmcdirmid »

photonthug wrote: post #632
tsimionescu wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's ultimately a kind of lossy statistical compression scheme at some level. And on this subject, it seems worthwhile to note that compression has never freed anyone from copyright/piracy considerations before. If I record a movie with a cell phone at a worse quality, that doesn't change things. If a book is copied and stored in some gzipped format where I can only read a page at a time, or only read a random page…

If you watch a bunch of movies then go on to make your own movie based on influence from these movies, you are protected even if you have mentally compressed them into your own movie. At some point, you can learn, be influenced and be inspired from copyrighted material (not copyright infringement), and at some point you are just making a poor copy of the material (definitely copyright infringement). LLMs are probably still at the latter case than the former, but eventually AI will reach the former case.

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

#638

Post by belter »

tracyhenry wrote: post #605
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…

> the first being at the birth of modern search engines. Why do you say that? Search engines would at least direct the viewer to the source. NYT gets 35%+ of its traffic from Google: https://www.similarweb.com/website/nytimes.com/#traffic-sour...

Just because they asked for forgiveness instead of asking first for permission, it's original sins will not be erased :-)

"Google Agrees to Pay Canadian Media for Using Their Content" - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/world/americas/google-can...

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

#639

Post by charonn0 »

rand1239 wrote: post #557
charonn0 wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, this sounds like a conspiracy theory and/or an attempt to deflect criticism from the AI companies.

Ohh. You think being owner of a company whose newspaper is read by hundreds of millions of people every day, doesn't put you in a position of power to control the society?

I think I have better things to do than parse vague innuendo like that.

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

#640

Post by TheCoreh »

tsimionescu wrote: post #610
ahepp wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Conceptually, it wouldn't be very hard to take the candidate output and run it through a text matching phase to see if there are ~exact matches in the training corpus, and generate other output if there are (probably limited to the parts of the training corpus where rights couldn't be obtained normally). Of course, it would be quite compute heavy, so it would add significantly to the cost per query.

GitHub Copilot supports that:

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/configuring-github-copilo...

Given how cheap text search is compared with LLM inference, and that GitHub reuses the same infrastructure for its code search, I doubt it adds more than 1% to the total cost.

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