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NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

arstechnica.com

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Re: NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

#81

Post by agentgumshoe »

ramesh31 wrote: post #37
fasterik wrote: post #26

I've been arguing since ChatGPT came out that LLMs should fall under fair use as a "transformative work". I'm not a lawyer and this is just my non-expert opinion, but it will be interesting to see what the legal system has to say about this.

It's inevitable that this question ends up at the supreme court. And the sooner the better IMO. It's clearly fair use. Generative agents will be seen legally as no different than a human artist leveraging the summation of their influences to create a new work.

Clearly fair use? What if I pay ChatGPT to give me the NYT article it sourced verbatim as stored (i.e. without referring me to the NYT source)?

Re: NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

#82

Post by visarga »

groceryheist wrote: post #41

The suit demonstrates instances where ChatGTP / Bing Copilot copy from the NYT verbatim. I think it is hard to argue that such copying constitutes "fair use". However, OAI/MS should be able to fix this within the current paradigm: Just learn to recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF. However, the suit goes far beyond claiming that such copying violates their copyright: "Unauthorized copying of Times Works without p…

> Just learn to recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF.

This is not a RLHF problem. What I was expecting them to do is to keep a bloom filter of ngrams for known copyrighted content, such as enumerating all sets of n=7 consecutive words in an article, and validate against it. The model would only output at maximum n-1 words that look verbatim from the source.

But this will blow up in their face. Let's see:

- AI companies will start investing much more in content attribution

- The new content attribution tools will be applied on all human written articles as well, because anyone could be using GPT in secret

- Then people will start seeing a chilling effect on creativity

- We must also check NYT against all the other sources, not everything the write is original

Re: NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

#83

Post by __loam »

altals2023 wrote: post #49

Won't hold in court. GPT is a platform mainly providing answer to private individuals asking. Is like you ask a professor a question and he answered verbatim what copyrighted materials available (due to photographic memory) word for word back to you. Now if you take this answer and write a book or publish enmass on blogs for example, then you are the one should be sued by NYT. If GPT use the exact same wordings and p…

I hope people start calling out the "well it's fine if a human does it" arguments out for the rat fuck thinking it is. These are computational systems operating at very large scales run by some of the wealthiest companies in the world.

If I go fishing, the regulations I have to comply with are very light because the effect I have on the environment is minimal. The regulations for an industrial fishing barge are rightfully very different, even if the end result is the same fish on your plate.

Re: NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

#84

Post by __loam »

tarruda wrote: post #72

Would be funny if NT Times won this and all commercial LLMs were shut down. Then LLMs would be distributed only via torrents, like most copyright infringing media.

Making these things anathema to commercial interests and making training them at scale legally perilous would be a huge win.

Re: NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

#85

Post by realusername »

tarruda wrote: post #72

Would be funny if NT Times won this and all commercial LLMs were shut down. Then LLMs would be distributed only via torrents, like most copyright infringing media.

They would still thrive but in other countries with other legal frameworks. The concept is way too valuable to disappear.

Re: NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

#86

Post by arrrg »

KETHERCORTEX wrote: post #80
outside1234 wrote: post #4

Seems reasonable - they probably broke the TOS of the site

On the other hand, NYT website willingly gave out all the information without imposing limitations. Seeing terms of service requires visiting a separate page, they aren't seen immediately upon visiting the website. Understanding and accepting the terms also requires a human interaction. robots.txt on nytimes.com now disallows indexing by GPTBot, so there's an argument against automated information acquisition startin…

Seems weird to argue that you have to speak up if you don’t want something done to you or else you consent to everything.

I do think that’s the case for some things but especially for new things that doesn’t seem like a common sense understanding of the world.

Re: NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

#87

Post by __loam »

dahart wrote: post #44
mynegation wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suit claims that GPT reproduced passages from NYT almost verbatim.

I don’t doubt it does. It’s easy to get it to spit out long answers from Stack Overflow verbatim, I’ve done it. Maybe some of the “transformative” nature of the LLM output is the removal of any authorship, copyright, license, and edit history information. ;) The point here is to supplant Google as the portal of information, right? It doesn’t have new information, but it’s pretty good at remixing the words from multip…

I don't think these can replace search engines.

Re: NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

#88

Post by lodovic »

mynegation wrote: post #29
fasterik wrote: post #26

I've been arguing since ChatGPT came out that LLMs should fall under fair use as a "transformative work". I'm not a lawyer and this is just my non-expert opinion, but it will be interesting to see what the legal system has to say about this.

Suit claims that GPT reproduced passages from NYT almost verbatim.

I'm sure the NYT uses dictionaries, encyclopaedias and style books verbatim as well. And they don't invent the facts they write about. As journalists they are compiling and passing along other knowledge. You usually don't get a piece of their income when a journalist quotes you verbatim (people usually don't get paid for interviews).

Re: NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

#89

Post by Garrrrrr »

__loam wrote: post #83
altals2023 wrote: post #49

Won't hold in court. GPT is a platform mainly providing answer to private individuals asking. Is like you ask a professor a question and he answered verbatim what copyrighted materials available (due to photographic memory) word for word back to you. Now if you take this answer and write a book or publish enmass on blogs for example, then you are the one should be sued by NYT. If GPT use the exact same wordings and p…

I hope people start calling out the "well it's fine if a human does it" arguments out for the rat fuck thinking it is. These are computational systems operating at very large scales run by some of the wealthiest companies in the world. If I go fishing, the regulations I have to comply with are very light because the effect I have on the environment is minimal. The regulations for an industrial fishing barge are right…

unfortunately that's not the crowd of people here. 80% of the comments under this thread (right now, 2:52est) are making similar arguments and *continue* to act like LLMs are doing something unique/creative... instead of just generating sentences, from algorithms, from virtually pirated content in the form of data mining

Re: NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

#90

Post by groceryheist »

visarga wrote: post #82
groceryheist wrote: post #41

The suit demonstrates instances where ChatGTP / Bing Copilot copy from the NYT verbatim. I think it is hard to argue that such copying constitutes "fair use". However, OAI/MS should be able to fix this within the current paradigm: Just learn to recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF. However, the suit goes far beyond claiming that such copying violates their copyright: "Unauthorized copying of Times Works without p…

> Just learn to recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF. This is not a RLHF problem. What I was expecting them to do is to keep a bloom filter of ngrams for known copyrighted content, such as enumerating all sets of n=7 consecutive words in an article, and validate against it. The model would only output at maximum n-1 words that look verbatim from the source. But this will blow up in their face. Let's see: - AI com…

Maybe the bloom filter solution is enough, but I wonder.

- Paraphrasing n=7 words (and quite a few more) within a sentence can easily be fair use.

- As n gets big, the bloom filter has to also.

If/when attribution is solved for LLMs (and not fake attribution like from Bing or Perplexity) then creators can be compensated when their works are used in AI outputs. If compensation is high enough this can greatly incentivize creativity, perhaps to the point of realizing "free culture" visions from the late 90s.

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