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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

#741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not. They can skip the entirety of the NYT archives and not much of value will be lost. The issue is with every copycat lawsuit that sues every AI company out of existence. It's a chilling effect on AI development. Old entrenched companies trying to prohibit new ways of learning and sharing information for the sake of their profit.

Why don’t they train their AI on non-copyrighted material? It’s only fair for the copyright owners to want a share of the pie. I’d want one as well for my work.

Because no one forced them to, and the copyrighted dataset is much larger? It's like trying to teach your kids using only non copyrighted textbooks. There's not much out there.

Copyright is an ancient system that is a poor legal framework for the modern world, IMO. I don't think it should exist at all. Of course as a rightsholder you are free to disagree.

If we can learn and recite information, and a robot can too, then we should have the same rules.

It's not like ChatGPT is going around writing its own copycat articles and publishing them in newsstands. If it's good at memorizing and regurgitating NYT articles on request, so what? Google can do that too, and so can a human who spends time memorizing them. That's not its intent or usefulness. What's amazing is that it can combine that with other information and synthesize novel analysis.

The NYT is desperate (understandably). Journalism is a hard hard field with no money. But I'd much rather lose them than OpenAI. Of course copyright law isn't up to me, but if it were, I'd dissolve it altogether.

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

#742
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

If someone paid me to study cancer and I discovered a cure, I'd give it away with or without credit. Who cares? If someone takes my software and uses it, cool. If they credit me, cool. If they don't, oh well. I'd still code. Not everything needs to be ego driven. As long as the cancer researcher (and the future robots working alongside them) can make a living, I really don't think it matters whether they get credit o…

Your incentives are not everyone else's incentives.

If someone chooses to dedicate their life to a particular domain - they sacrifice through hard work, they make hard-earned breakthroughs, then they get to dictate how their work will be utilized.

Sure, you can give it away. Your choice. Be anonymous. Your choice.

But you don't get to decide for them.

And their work certainly doesn't deserve to be stolen by an inhumane, non-acknowledging machine.

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

#743
post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the exception of source code availability, copyleft is mostly about using copyright to destroy itself. Without copyright (which I feel is unethical), and with additional laws to enforce open sourcing all binaries, copyleft need not exist. So it is not good when people use copyleft as a justification for copyright, given that its whole purpose was to destroy it.

Source code availability (and the ability to modify the code on a device) is the most important part, IMO , regardless of RMS's original intention. Do you feel that it's ethical that OpenAI is keeping their model closed?

No, because I think such restrictions are unethical in the first place. However, in regards to training, I think it might be a necessary evil to allow companies to ignore copyleft, so smaller entities can ignore copyright to train open models.

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

#744
post #686
post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the future AI can indeed cure disease my mission of working in drug discovery will be complete. I’d much rather help cure people (my brother died of melanoma) than protect any patent rights or copyrighted text.

The point is if you stop giving proper credit, people stop publicly publishing. Would you keep publishing articles if five people immediately stole the content and put it up on their site, claiming ownership of your research? Doubtful.

Why do you think this? The entirety of Wikipedia is invisibly credited unless you go into the edit history. Most open source projects have pseudonymous contributors. People have written and will continue to write with or without credit.

Credit in academia is more the exception to the rule, and it's that cutthroat industry that needs a better, more cooperative system.

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

#745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's no obvious need to hold people / AI to same standards here, yet, even if compression in mental-models is exactly analogous to compression in machine-models. I guess we decided already that corporations are already "like" persons legally, but the jury is still out on AIs. Perhaps people should be allowed more leeway to make possibly-questionable derivative works, because they have lives to live, and genuine if…

> But it seems to me that, if anything, machines should be held to higher standard than people.

If machines achieve sentience, does this still hold? Like, we have to license material for our sentient AI to learn from? They can't just watch a movie or read a book like a normal human could without having the ability to more easily have that material influence new derived works (unlike say Eragon, which is shamelessly Star Wars/Harry Potter/LOTR with dragons).

It will be fun to trip through these questions over the next 20 years.

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

#746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure whether that would even be a net loss, TBH. So much commercial media is crap, maybe it would be better for the profit motive to be removed? On the fiction side, there's plenty of fan-fic and indie productions. On the nonfiction side, many indie creators produce better content these days than the big media outlets do. And there still might be room for premium investigative stories done either by a few con…

Your ability to cleanly believe you’ve got a clear read on the challenges, solutions and outcomes from AI for the social/civil/corporate mess that is media, across small to large markets, and chalk it up to “silly IP battles,” is the daily reminder I need on why it was so wrong to give tech the driver’s seat from ~2010 onward.

I read your post several times but still am not sure if I'm reading it correctly. Are you saying the media landscape is more complex than AI can solve?

If so, sure. I wasn't saying that. By "silly IP battles", I meant old guard media companies trying to sue AI out of existence just to defend their IP rather than trying to innovate. Not that different from what we saw with the RIAA and Napster. Somehow the music industry survived and there are more indie artists being discovered all the time.

I don't think this is so much a battle of OpenAI vs NYT but whether copyright law has outlived its usefulness. I think so.

If I misunderstood your reply completely, I apologize.

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

#747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News media like NYT, Fox etc are tools for high scale brainwashing public by the elite. This is why you see all the News papers have some political ideology. If they were reporting on truth and not opinions they won't have the need for leaning. Also you never see the journalists reporting against their own publication. Humanity is better off without these mass brainwashing systems. Millions of independent journalists…

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

There is no conspiracy, that's the neat part, it's just how the system itself works.

Media survives through advertising. Those who advertise dictate what gets shown and what doesn't, since if something inconvenient for them gets shown, they might not want to advertise there anymore, which means less money. It's the exact same thing that happens online, it's just more evident online than in traditional media.

How come that even before Oct 7 Europe in general sided more with Palestine than with Israel, whereas it's the opposite for the US? Simple, Israel does a whole lot of lobbying in the US, which skews information in their favor. Calling this "brainwashing" is hyperbolic, but there is some truth to it.

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

#748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see, the narrative switched form “cat’s out of the bag” to “genie’s out of the bottle”. Regardless, no one wants to ban llms. We just want the theft to stop.

Copying is not theft. Stealing a thing leaves one less left Copying it makes one thing more; that’s what copying’s for.

   My code was AGPL.
   OpenAI can go to h..l
(Footnote: I like your poem. It conveys the concept much better than anywhere I'd ever seen before)

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

#749
post #101

The way to view this kind of parasitism is how we look at patent trolls. When you look at the RIAA/MPAA lawsuits, while I don't agree with them, at least file sharing was basically a canonical form of copyright infringement. With LLMs we have an aspect of a text corpus that the creators were not using (the language patterns) and had no plans for or even idea that it could be used, and then when someone comes along an…

> It doesn't benefit society

Bold (and wrong) claim

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

#750
post #590
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

If the future AI can indeed cure disease my mission of working in drug discovery will be complete. I’d much rather help cure people (my brother died of melanoma) than protect any patent rights or copyrighted text.

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