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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

#761

Post by artninja1988 »

Spivak wrote: post #586
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope this results in Fair Use being expanded to cover AI training. Couldn't disagree more strongly, and I hope the outcome is the exact opposite. I think we've already started to see the severe negative consequences when the lion's share of the profits get sucked up by very, very few entities (e.g. we used to have tons of local papers and other entities that made money through advertising, now Google and Facebook…

So you want all the profit to be sucked up by the three companies that can afford to make deals with rights holders to slurp up all their content? Making the process for training AI require an army of lawyers and industry connections will have the opposite effect than you intend.

Scam altman is moatmaxxing. Making a deal with springer, setting up a licensing market everyone has to abide by. Having to get an agi license to purchase a 4090

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

#762

Post by denton-scratch »

ethanbond wrote: post #679
denton-scratch wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, its existence does prove it's possible! I contribute to Wikipedia, and I don't consider my contributions to be "charity"; I contribute because I enjoy it. Even in the age of printing presses, copyright law was widely ignored, well into the 20thC. The USA didn't join the Berne Convention until 1989 (and they promptly went mad with copyright). Yes, there's only one Wikipedia; but there are lots of copies, and lot…

> I contribute to Wikipedia, and I don't consider my contributions to be "charity"; I contribute because I enjoy it. Does your personal satisfaction pay the server bills too?

Of course not. But paying the server bills won't magically produce the excellent content that you value so much. That's produced by volunteers.

There's a tendency among some people to take the nostrums of economists about the aggregate behaviour of populations as if they described human nature, and to then go on and conclude that because human behaviour in aggregate can be understood in terms of economic incentives, that an individual human can only be motivated economically. I find that an impoverished and shallow outlook, and I think I'm happier for not sharing it.

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

#763

Post by graphe »

Jensson wrote: post #760
graphe wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube had made way more content creators wealthy than the NYT. Writers are not going to be paid more after this ruling either way.

Has the NYT made even a single content creator wealthy? Journalists there make less money than an average software engineer.

It's in the realm of possibility, lots of people found work post vox and buzzfeed too but i wouldn't classify it as the work of the NYT. "Real" creatives and content creators seem to embrace AI or at least grudgingly alter their own works, the OP I'm replying to would be cheering YouTube for suing openAI on the behalf of YouTubers everywhere, despite it having no bearing on reality.

The main objectors are the old guard monopolies that are threatened.

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

#764

Post by lewhoo »

MeImCounting wrote: post #567
aantix wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine. Solve it a different way. OpenAI doesn't just get to steal work and then say "sorry, not possible" and shrug it off. The NYTimes should be suing.

And god willing if there is any justice in the courts NYTimes will lose this frivolous lawsuit. Copyright law is a prehistoric and corrupt system that has been about protecting the profit margins of Disney and Warner Bros rather than protecting real art and science for living memory. Unless copy/paste superhero movies are your definition of art I suppose. Unfortunately it seems like judges and the general public are…

> Copyright law is a prehistoric and corrupt system that has been about protecting the profit margins of Disney and Warner Bros rather than protecting real art

These types of arguments miss the mark entirely imho. First and foremost, not every instance of copyrighted creation involves a giant corporation. Second, what you are arguing against is the unfair leverage corporations have when negotiating a deal with a rising artist.

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

#765

Post by ethanbond »

denton-scratch wrote: post #762
ethanbond wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I contribute to Wikipedia, and I don't consider my contributions to be "charity"; I contribute because I enjoy it. Does your personal satisfaction pay the server bills too?

Of course not. But paying the server bills won't magically produce the excellent content that you value so much. That's produced by volunteers. There's a tendency among some people to take the nostrums of economists about the aggregate behaviour of populations as if they described human nature, and to then go on and conclude that because human behaviour in aggregate can be understood in terms of economic incentives,…

I don’t think “people tend to do things at higher quality and higher frequency when incentivized” is some esoteric economic theory.

I never made the claim that paying server bills would produce great content.

I never made the claim “an individual human can only be motivated economically.”

Your strategy for personal happiness is unrelated to what actually works in the real world at scale.

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

#766

Post by idonotknowwhy »

graphe wrote: post #738
tremon wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It mainly made mediocre drummers sound better to the untrained ear.

I agree. Hitting perfect notes constantly with little or no variation is pretty hard for a person to do. Now anything "live" or proof of humanity is better sounding since it's not as sterile.

I agree with this. I prefer live music with the imperfections. And I like it when unmixed live recordings are leaked

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

#767

Post by andy99 »

twoodfin wrote: post #754
hhsectech wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not for or against anything at this point until someone gets their balls out and clearly defines what copyright infringement means in this context. If you give a bunch of books to a kid all by the same author and then pay that kid to write a book in a similar style and then I go on to sell that book...have I somehow infringed copyright? The kids book at best is likely to be a very convincing facsimile of the orig…

There are two problems with the “kid” analogy: a) In many closely comparable scenarios, yes, it’s copyright infringement. When Francis Ford Coppola made The Godfather film, he couldn’t just be “inspired” by Puzo’s book. If the story or characters or dialog are similar enough, he has to pay Puzo, even if the work he created was quite different and not a literal “copy”. b) Training an LLM isn’t like giving someone a bo…

> This copy is not a transitory copy in service of a fair use

Training is almost certainly fair use, so it's exactly a transitory copy in service of fair use. Training, other than the brief "transitory copy" you mention is not copying, it's making a minuscule algorithmic adjustment based on fleeting exposure to the data.

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

#768

Post by solardev »

ahepp wrote: post #577
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 know utilitarianism is a popular moral theory in hacker circles, but is it really appropriate to dispense with any other notion of justice? I don’t mean to go off on too deep of a tangent, but if one person’s (or even many people’s) idea of what’s good for humanity is the only consideration for what’s just, it seems clear that the result would be complete chaos. As it stands, it doesn’t seem to be an “either or” ch…

I don't know that "absolute utilitarianism", if such a thing could even exist, would make a sound moral framework; that sounds too much like a "tyranny of the majority" situation. Tech companies shouldn't make the rules. And they shouldn't be allowed to just do whatever they want. However, this isn't that. This is just a debate over intellectual property and copyright law.

In this case it's the NYT vs OpenAI, last decade it was the RIAA vs Napster.

I'm not much of a libertarian (in fact, I'd prefer a better central government), but I also don't believe IP should have as much protection as it does. I think copyright law is in need of a complete rewrite, and yes, utilitarianism and public use would be part of the consideration. If it were up to me I'd scrap the idea of private intellectual property altogether and publicly fund creative works and release them into the public domain, similar to how we treat creative works of the federal government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_t...

Rather than capitalists competing to own ideas, grant-seekers would seek funding to pursue and further develop their ideas. No one would get rich off such a system, which is a side benefit in my eyes.

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

#769

Post by solardev »

spopejoy wrote: post #728
insanitybit wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why using authored NYT articles is “stupid IP battles” When an AI uses information from an article it's no difference from me doing it in a blog post. If I'm just summarizing or referencing it, that's fair use, since that's my 'take' on the content. > having to pay for the trained model with them is not stupid? Because you can charge for anything you want. I can also charge for my summaries of NYT articles.

If you include entire paragraphs without citing, that's copyright violation, not fair use. If your blog was big enough to matter NYT would definitely sue. A human makes their own choices about what to disseminate, whereas these are singular for-profit services that anybody can query. The prompt injection attacks that reveal the original text show that the originals are retrievable, so if OpenAI et al cannot exchausti…

I don't think fair use is quite that black-and-white. There are many factors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors (from 17 USC 107: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title17/html...)

> "[...] the fair use of a copyrighted work [...] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."

----

So here we have OpenAI, ostensibly a nonprofit, using portions of a copyrighted work for commenting on and educating (the prompting user), in a way that doesn't directly compete with NYT (nobody goes "Hey ChatGPT, what's today's news?"), not intentionally copying and publishing their materials (they have to specifically probe it to get it to spit out the copyrighted content). There's not a commercial intent to compete with the NYT's market. There is a subscription fee, but there is also tuition in private classrooms and that doesn't automatically make it a copyright violation. And citing the source or not doesn't really factor into copyright, that's just a politeness thing.

I'm not a lawyer. It's just not that straightforward. But of course the court will decide, not us randos on the internet...

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

#770

Post by bamboozled »

solardev wrote: post #730
ngetchell wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I don't think it's hyperbole, in fact I think it's understating things a bit. I believe AGI would just be a tiny step towards long term evolution, which may or may not involve homo sapiens. Being able to use electricity as a fuel source and code as a genome allows them to evolve in circumstances hostile to biological organisms. Someday they'll probably incorporate organic components too and understand biology and psy…

This will never happen. A super intelligent being can just simulate whatever it wants to know about the universe. Going to the stars is a primate / conquest thing.

In the other hand, any new life will just end up facing the same issues carbon life does , competition, viruses, conflicts etc. the universe has likely had an infinity to come up with what it has come up with. I don’t think it’s “stupid”. We’re part of an ecosystem we just can’t see that.

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