NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

Post by cycomanic » Thu, Dec 28, 2023, 12:49 PM UTC

caeril wrote: post #319

munchinator wrote: post #180

It's interesting to me the ambiguous attitude people have to reproducing news content. Whenever there is a story from NYT on HN (or any other large media outlet), the top comment is almost always a link to an archived version which reproduces the text verbatim. And this seems to be tolerated as the norm. And yet, whenever there is a submission about a book, a TV show, a movie, a video game, an album, a comic book, or…

Oh it's worse than that. The NYT is positing that any neural network that is trained on their data, and can summarize or very closely approximate an article's content on request, is in violation. This reasoning would presumably apply to any neural network, including one made of neurons, dendrites, and axons. So any human reader of the NYT who is capable of accurately summarizing what they read is an evil copyright vi…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 28, 2023, 12:55 PM UTC

nulbyte wrote: post #332

Baldbvrhunter wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say 9 times out of 10 it's to get around the paywall and absolutely not some higher moralistic preservation of history. And everything is a grey area, determining the line is the existential purpose of these court cases. We've been here before with hyperlinking, then indexing and then linking with previews and the Canadian Facebook stuff but I think this has more standing.

If I buy a book, I get a work of literature. But if I buy a news subscription I get a series of facts riddled with advertisements. I accept the former, but I oppose the latter. I suspect I'm not the only one.

Post by kolinko » Thu, Dec 28, 2023, 12:55 PM UTC

rich_sasha wrote: post #157

px43 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can tell, this has nothing to do with LLMs at all. In the example in the article, the user is asking Bing to go fetch the contents of an article directly from the website, and print it out, which it dutifully does. Seems like the "problem" is that NYT etc gives privileged access to search engines for indexing their content, but then get upset when snippets of the indexed content is being shown to users wi…

I suppose that's a relatively easy thing to fix, technically. It proves, however, that th underlying LLM is trained on copyrighted data. I'm not sure the problem goes away simply if the LLM in question (or any other one) gets some "no verbose regurgitation" filter.

Post by cycomanic » Thu, Dec 28, 2023, 12:57 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #244

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…

I think it is an RLHF problem and that you are right - this will blow up in the faces of the NYT. Specifically, the NYT examples all seem to be cases where they asked the AI to repeat their articles verbatim? So they ask it to violate copyright and because it's a helpful bot with a good memory, it does so. Solution: teach the model to refuse requests to repeat articles verbatim. It's easily capable of recognizing whe…

Post by spacecadet » Thu, Dec 28, 2023, 12:58 PM UTC

jarrell_mark wrote: post #67

spacecadet wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Anything + 2 and then minus two is back to the original thing. This says more about the transformations than the source material.