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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

#101

Post by colechristensen »

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…

I think NYT is going to win.

LLMs are arguably compressed data archives with weird algorithms. The fact that they will regularly regurgitate verbatim quotes of training data is evidence of this, as are the guardrails that try to prevent this.

The second piece of evidence is this paper explained here https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/why-gzip-just-beat-a-large-l... where instead of an LLM researchers used gzip compressed data as a model and it even beat trained LLMs.

AI is a bit of a black box, but that doesn’t protect the operators of black boxes from rights violation suits. You can’t make a database of scraped copyrighted data and patented that querying that data is fair use.

There needs to be law made here and the law just isn’t going to be “everybody can copy everything for free as long as it’s for model training”.

Licensing will have to be worked out, actual laws and not just case law needs to be written. I have a lot of sympathy for lots of leeway for the open source researchers and hackers doing things… but not so much for Microsoft and Microsoft sponsored openai.

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

#102

Post by visarga »

groceryheist wrote: post #90
visarga wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 incentivi…

As n-gram length grows, we are still going to have the same number of ngrams, they go through a hashing function and indexed in the bloom filter as usual. The number of n-grams size n in a text is text_length - ngram_length + 1.

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

#103

Post by dathery »

spacecadet wrote: post #59
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…

Transformations are happening. Maybe if the output is verbatim afterwards, than that says something about the outputs originality all along... or am I a troll?

They're talking about transformative with regard to copyright law where it is an important part of determining fair use, not the dictionary definition you're using here.

I can't take NY Times articles, translate them into Spanish, and then sell the translations under fair use, even though clearly I've transformed the original article content.

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

#104

Post by StableAlkyne »

__loam wrote: post #84
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.

A huge win for countries with lax copyright laws. These things aren't going away, the worst case scenario would be exactly that scenario playing out - then China (or some other peer to the US's tech sector) just continues developing them to achieve an economic advantage. All in addition to the obvious political implications of AI chatbots being controlled by them.

The LLM genie is out of the bottle: an unfavorable court ruling in a single country isn't going to stuff it back in.

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

#105

Post by fsckboy »

mdekkers wrote: post #96
__loam wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> making training them at scale legally perilous would be a huge win. Why?

I have no idea what he's thinking, but if everybody in the community here had an LLM in their pocket and large orgs did not, it would at least be kind of fun.

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

#106

Post by cornel_io »

peyton wrote: post #66
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…

Well yeah, copying a work and using it for its original expressive purpose isn’t fair use, no? You have to use it for a transformative purpose. Suppose I’m selling subscriptions to the New Jersey Times, a site which simply downloads New York Times articles and passes them through an autoencoder with some random noise. It serves the exact same purpose as the New York Times website, except I make the money. Is that fai…

If they could find a single person who in natural use (e.g. not as they were trying to gather data for this lawsuit) has ever actually used ChatGPT as a direct substitution for a NYT subscription, I'd support this lawsuit.

But nobody would do that, because ChatGPT is a really shitty way to read NYT articles (it's stale, it can't reliably reproduce them, etc.). All that is valuable about it is the way that it transforms and operates on that data in conjunction with all the other data that it has.

The real world use of ChatGPT is very transformative, even if you can trick it into behaving in ways that are not. If the courts act intelligently they should at least weigh that as part of their decision.

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

#107

Post by colechristensen »

fsckboy wrote: post #100
jahewson wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many instances of fair use involve verbatim copying. The important questions surround the situation in which that happens - not so much the copying. NYT is in uncharted territory here.

in the same way that machines are not able to claim copyright, they aren't allowed to claim other legal rights either, like "fair use". The entity which owns ChatGPT is apparently maintaining a copy of the entirety of the New York Times archive within the ChatGPT knowledge base. That they extract some fair use snippets (they would claim) from it would still be fruit of a poisoned tree, no? (disclaimer: I'm pro AI, an…

I think there is some point between fifty years ago and last week in which the copyright for the content of newspapers should be public domain. That part of copyright needs to be fixed.

Your creative work does deserve at least some period of exclusive rights for you. Definitely not so much that your grandchildren get to quibble about it well into retirement. But also whatever the number 3 or 4 most valuable company in the world doesn’t get to scrape your content daily to repackage and sell as intelligent systems.

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

#108

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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

OpenAI has created a $100bn company on this transfer. The Times may have an interest in a material fraction of that wealth.

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

#110

Post by fsckboy »

in my head I like to think of web crawler search engines/search engine databases and LLMs as being somewhat similar. Search engines are ok if they just provide snippets with citations (urls), and they would be unacceptable if they provided large block quotes that removed the need to go to the original source to read the original expression of more complex ideas.

A web-crawled LLM that lived within the same constraints would be a search engine under another name, with a slightly different presentation style. If it starts spitting out entire articles without citation, that's not acceptable.

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