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NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

arstechnica.com

131–140 of 921 posts

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

#131
Isn't copyright tethered somehow to a notion of "expression"? That is, the same ideas and facts expressed differently are a different work?

Sure, when something is clearly derived, or just expressed in a new medium, then I'm sure it's still covered. But if it goes through an LLM and the result bears little resemblance, how can that still fall under copyright?

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

#132
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why someone work with full time writing articles should give the work for free They are not giving it out "for free", in fact they're being paid by their employer to write these articles. Moreover, the writers themselves stand noth' to gain from their past writings financially as they don't belong to the ownership structure of the business.

Their ability to make money in the future is directly tied to their employers' ability to make money with their content. This is a closed financial loop. If OpenAI or any other AI company wants in, they should pay a licensing fee or get the laws changed, not just assume that they can take what they want and pretend like there are no negative consequences for the creator or the rights-holder.

No one is pretending there are no "there are no negative consequences for the creator or the rights-holder". Of course there are. But this is a story of rights-holders, who've already outgrown their usefulness, wanting to tap themselves into money stream they are not entitled to.

ChatGPT isn't competing with NYT on a core competency. No one uses LLMs for original news reporting. They're obviously incapable of doing that, by virtue of not being there on the scene or able to independently research a topic, maintain relationships with sources, etc. What ChatGPT can do is quote/reproduce some parts of past articles, and reason from them. Or at least produce new text that's somewhat related to the old text.

The threat to NYT is this: ChatGPT is much better bullshitter than they are, so it reduces NYT to its core competency: providing original information. Which is all it should be doing in the first place. But instead, NYT wants to not only keep the bullshitting part of its revenue, but also take a cut or destroy the much greater and much more useful part of where this all feeds a general-purpose language model.

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

#133

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…

Professors and schools get into legal problems when professors pirate and/or otherwise distribute content they don't have licenses for.

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> if compensation is high enough Who pays the compensation? If it's the user, why wouldn't they just buy the authors work directly? Why go through the LLM middleman?

The LLM users/middlemen pay. The user probably pays less than they would have to pay the author. The LMM provides information retrieval / discovery.

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

#135

I read about this in the Times today (and am surprised that it wasn't on HN already). My guess is that the court will likely find in the Times favor, because the legal system won't be able to understand how training works and because people are "scared" of AI. To me, reading a book, putting it in some storage system, and then recalling it to form future thoughts is fair use. It's what we all do all the time, and I th…

My hard drive can - bit for bit - recall video files. If I serve them to other people on the internet without permission of the copyright holder, that’s called piracy.

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

#136

I read about this in the Times today (and am surprised that it wasn't on HN already). My guess is that the court will likely find in the Times favor, because the legal system won't be able to understand how training works and because people are "scared" of AI. To me, reading a book, putting it in some storage system, and then recalling it to form future thoughts is fair use. It's what we all do all the time, and I th…

I don't agree that an LLM is doing what we are doing.

"Its what we do all the time" is a major assumption

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The number of unique values in the bloom filter will go up ~exponentially with n. So to control the false positive rate the bloom filter has to grow.

At large enough ngram size there would be very few collisions. You can take for example this text and try in Google with quotes, it won't find anything matching exactly.

I tested this 6-gram "it won't find anything matching exactly", no match. Almost anything we write has never been said exactly like that before.

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

#138
post #95
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Teaching" by copying source books word for word, would be copyright infringement; see, for example, the well-known issues around photocopying books or even excerpts. Also lying on source materials (e.g. telling students that some respected historian denies the Holocaust happened, when it's obviously not the case) is not "teaching" - it's defamation, and the NYT is absolutely right to pursue that angle too. Using LLM…

> Teaching" by copying source books word for word, would be copyright infringement; see, for example, the well-known issues around photocopying books or even excerpts. Incorrect. Educational use helps satisfy one of tests for fair use. Teachers can, in many cases, photocopy copyrighted work without infringing on that copyright.

Educational use is just one of the many factors used to determine whether an instance of copyright infringement is fair use or not, but it is not carte blanche for educators to ignore IP laws just because they're educating.

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

#139

If you forget about the LLM aspect, and simply build a product out of (legally) scraped NYT articles, is that fair use? Let's say I host these, offer some indexing on it, and rewrite articles. Something like, summarise all articles on US-UK relationships over past 5 years. I charge money for it, and all I pay NYT is a monthly subscription fee. To keep things simple, let's say I never regurgitate chunks of verbatim NY…

Another factor to consider is that neural nets can function as lossy compression, which becomes extremely evident when using models that are overfit. Sometimes they're so overfit that the compression isn't even lossy, and the data is encoded verbatim in the NN.

Yes, but this then hits against learning/understanding and compression being fundamentally the same thing. I can't think of a better way to argue in favor of "it's fine if human does it, therefore it's fine if LLM does it", than from the "lossy compression" angle.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would parroting back article content perfectly from memory certainly be copyright infringement?

Go perform a song in a public place without a licencing arrangement and let us know.

scale is important here - maybe a better analogy is setting up a paid Spotify clone with all the music sourced from torrents with some slight distortion effect added
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