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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

#161

Post by geysersam »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #104
__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.

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 co…

Do LLM really give an economic advantage though? I've mostly seen them used to write quirky poems and bad code. People are scrambling to find use-cases but it's not very convincing so far.

On the other hand, if LLM are used to "launder" copyright content and, accepting the premises of copyright law, this has the effect of reducing incentives to do creative work, that has obvious negative implications for economic productivity.

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

#162

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

ninjinxo wrote: post #145
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But is it still piracy if you compress them and serve only a likeness of the original?

If 20% of a NYT article is recalled correctly, does that mean I can publish 20% of a movie if surrounded by junk? What if I do that 5 times over?

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

#164

Post by munchinator »

Why hasn't the Times also sued the Internet Archive? They've tried to block both the Internet Archive [1] and Open AI [2] from archiving their site, but why have they only sued OAI and not IA? The fact that they haven't sued IA which has comparatively little money would seem to indicate that this is not about fair use per se, but simply about profit-seeking and the NYT is selecting targets with deep pockets like OAI/MS.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2023/09/17/new-york-times-website-i...

[2] https://fortune.com/2023/08/25/major-media-organizations-are...

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

#165

Post by unsupp0rted »

verve_rat wrote: post #77
unsupp0rted wrote: post #69

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.

My favorite example of performing a song in a public place without a licensing arrangement:

https://youtu.be/j_UoACEUZqA

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

#166

Post by fsckboy »

aurareturn wrote: post #158
fsckboy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say I'm an academic; if my research, note-taking, and paper writing skills lead to fair-use, cited quotations where applicable, general knowledge not identified, and the creative aspects and unique conclusions creating the intriguing part of my work, that's copacetic. If I spit out (from memory, mind you) verbatim quotes and light rewordings of NY Times articles, that's not; "I don't remember where I got that m…

You're not replicating yourself millions of times and selling yourself for $20/month. If you are, then NYT might sue you too. I'm not saying LLMs are by default, illegal. All I'm saying is that there is some merit to why NYT and content companies want a piece of the pie and think they deserve it.

The NY Times benefited in the past from technologies that led to widespread distribution of the Times, putting competitors out of business and concentrating talent at the Times. Nobody is stopping them from producing new editions of the newspaper, their core business. People now have technologies that help them "remember" what was salient in back issues of the Times. Such is progress.

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

#167

Post by StableAlkyne »

geysersam wrote: post #161
StableAlkyne wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Do LLM really give an economic advantage though? I've mostly seen them used to write quirky poems and bad code. People are scrambling to find use-cases but it's not very convincing so far. On the other hand, if LLM are used to "launder" copyright content and, accepting the premises of copyright law, this has the effect of reducing incentives to do creative work, that has obvious negative implications for economic pro…

> I've mostly seen them used to write quirky poems and bad code.

Assuming this is in good faith: the ability to write code, documentation, and tests is absolutely a productivity enhancer to an existing programmer. The code snippets from a dedicated tool like copilot are of very usable quality if you're using a popular language like Python or JS.

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

#168

Post by heavyset_go »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #139
heavyset_go wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not okay for a human to pirate, plagiarize, violate IP rights and laws, etc.

But I disagree with the underlying assumption that you can anthropomorphize LLMs. Gradient descent and backpropagation don't take place in the brain. LLMs "learn" in the same way that Excel sheets "learn".

Humans are living beings with needs and rights. A person being able to legally squat in a home doesn't mean that a drone occupying property for some amount of time also has squatter's rights, even though you could easily and affordably automate and scale the deployment of drones to live and hide away on properties long enough to attain rights regarding properties all over the country.

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

#170

Post by killingtime74 »

munchinator wrote: post #164

Why hasn't the Times also sued the Internet Archive? They've tried to block both the Internet Archive [1] and Open AI [2] from archiving their site, but why have they only sued OAI and not IA? The fact that they haven't sued IA which has comparatively little money would seem to indicate that this is not about fair use per se, but simply about profit-seeking and the NYT is selecting targets with deep pockets like OAI/…

What's wrong with that? If I was the NY Time's lawyers that what I would advise. What would it serve to bankrupt the IA, they can't pay anyway? These are corporations enforcing their rights against one another.

There is nothing wrong with profit seeking from your copyright. That's literally their entire business model...they publish copyrighted content which they sell for a subscription.

OpenAI and others could easily have negotiated a licence instead of just using the data. They bet that it would be cheaper to be sued, lets find out if they bet correctly.

Tangentially that's what Apple did with the sensor in their watch, it doesn't always pay off.

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