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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

#461

Post by UrineSqueegee »

tantalor wrote: post #445
w4ffl35 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo gpt itself is the transformative work.

Ok but it's not

Definition of Transformative Use: The legal concept of transformative use involves significantly altering the original work to create new expressions, meanings, or messages. AI models like GPT don't merely reproduce text; they analyze, interpret, and recombine information to generate unique responses. This process can be argued as creating new meaning or purpose, different from the original works.

In the case of the famous screenshot, the AI just relayed the information it found on the web, it's not included in its training data.

So you're just wrong.

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

#462

Post by kmeisthax »

tzs wrote: post #363
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Whenever there is a story from NYT on HN (or any other large media outlet), the top comment is almost always a link to an archived version which reproduces the text verbatim.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…

> I think that's something worth reflecting on, about why we feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other IP As you noted it is not the norm to post pirate links here for IP other than news articles, but that doesn't mean that a lot of people think it is not OK to pirate those other forms of IP. In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video streaming there will be numerous posts from people ex…

The GPL was specifically written to lock code out of the proprietary realm, so if you hate copyright[0] you'll hate people using it as intended.

[0] To be clear, I know of few who actually like copyright. Tolerate it? Use it as needed? Sure. The only people who actually defend the current broken-ass system are large media companies which are built to optimally exploit it.

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

#463

Post by eropple »

perihelions wrote: post #236
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…

If it takes 120 seconds to read a newspaper article, the archive.is workflow is a significant overhead over that, a significant friction. Those links are a courtesy to other HN readers. This is very different from the economics of buying and reading a book. "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. " edit: It didn't even occur to me to compare the time-cost of "just pay for the article", b…

> edit: It didn't even occur to me to compare the time-cost of "just pay for the article", but: last I read, it's half an hour of work to cancel a New York Times subscription [0]. So, that option's not even on the table.

I canceled mine two weeks ago. It was four clicks. One annoyed me because they tried to get me to stay with an offer, but I didn't drop them because of the price.

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

#464

Post by ben_w »

heavyset_go wrote: post #168
TeMPOraL wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> 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".

Backprop doesn't happen in us, but I think our neurones still do gradient descent – synapses that fire together, wire together.

And ultimately, at the deepest level we can analyse, our brains' atoms are doing quantum field diffusion equations, which you can also do in an Excel spreadsheet, so that kind of reductionism doesn't help either.

> 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.

Yes, but we can also do tissue cultures and crude bioprinting, so it's a very foreseeable future where exactly the same argument will also be true for living organisms rather than digital minds.

We need to figure out what the deeper rules are that lead to the status quo, not merely mimic the superficial result. The latter is how cargo cults function.

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

#465

Post by [deleted] »

lupusreal wrote: post #296
hef19898 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me all of 5 minutes to cancel my digital NYT subscription from the following month onward. No idea what you are talking about.

Why did it take you five minutes instead of twenty seconds? It should be as simple as clicking on the link to your profile then clicking unsubscribe, mere seconds not minutes. Assuming you just said five minutes figuratively... Do you live in California or some other legal jurisdiction that forces them to play nice? Did you subscribe through some other company, like Apple? Horror stories about unsubscribing from the…

[deleted]

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

#466

Post by _jal »

tomComb wrote: post #433
tzs wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that's something worth reflecting on, about why we feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other IP As you noted it is not the norm to post pirate links here for IP other than news articles, but that doesn't mean that a lot of people think it is not OK to pirate those other forms of IP. In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video streaming there will be numerous posts from people ex…

Yeah, I don’t judge people for pirating or ad blocking, but the ludicrous justifications do get me - quite the entitled mental gymnastics. They remind me of bitcoin people trying to explain how mining is good for the environment.

There's a "polite society" thing going on.

Briefly, something like:

1) Ycombinator could not tolerate HN becoming a site known for sharing IP-law-violating content. And the people who come here by and large are smart and socialized enough to implicitly understand why.

2) At the same time, a large number of folks here mostly wink and nod at that sort of consumer infringement. And there's a society-wide bias towards "things like news are less protected", so that gets to slide.

3) But people also have a need to tell consistent-seeming stories about how things work, thus the mental gymnastics.

It ends up being similar to trying to explain why people pretend to be prudish innocents about sex. It largely reduces to "a small subset of the population goes sufficiently ballistic about what I consider to be relatively trivial stuff as to make it not worth fighting over, even if I find that to be ridiculous."

There are a lot of different versions of this that become so normalized it can be hard to notice.

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

#467

Post by truculent »

a_wild_dandan wrote: post #371

The NYT is preparing for a tsunami by building a sandcastle. Big picture, this suit won’t matter, for so many reasons. To enumerate a few: 1. Next gen LLMs will be trained exclusively on “synthetic”/public data. GPT-4V can easily whitewash its entire copyrighted training corpus to be unrecognizably distinct (say reworded by 40%, authors/sources stripped, etc). Ergo there will be no copyright material for GPT-5 to reg…

Are media really rent-seeking? They create new content and analysis, for which they want to be compensated. It seems quite different to hoarding natural resources or land, for example.

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

#468

Post by bonzini »

Symmetry wrote: post #449
aqme28 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Returning the full text of an article verbatim seems to me like the opposite of "transformative."

In the screenshot for the article you can see that the LLM says it is "Searching for: carl zimmer article on the oldest DNA". That, and what I know about how LLMs work, suggest to me that rather than the article being stored inside the trained LLM it was instead downloaded in response to the question. So the fact that the system is providing the full text of the article doesn't really go to whether training the LLM i…

Yes, the screenshot in the article is clearly doing an Internet search. The exhibit in the lawsuit shows that you can complete an article by using GPT on the first sentence of the prompt, with low temperature to aid reproducibility, and obtaining the original except for a single word. That is another thing, and it shows that the LLM has basically recorded the original text into its weights in compressed form: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GCY4WC6XYAAq-JS?format=jpg&name=...

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

#469

Post by tantalor »

UrineSqueegee wrote: post #461
tantalor wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but it's not

Definition of Transformative Use: The legal concept of transformative use involves significantly altering the original work to create new expressions, meanings, or messages. AI models like GPT don't merely reproduce text; they analyze, interpret, and recombine information to generate unique responses. This process can be argued as creating new meaning or purpose, different from the original works. In the case of the…

Only humans can do those things, so the test fails for LLM

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

#470

Post by dillydogg »

eropple wrote: post #463
perihelions wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it takes 120 seconds to read a newspaper article, the archive.is workflow is a significant overhead over that, a significant friction. Those links are a courtesy to other HN readers. This is very different from the economics of buying and reading a book. "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. " edit: It didn't even occur to me to compare the time-cost of "just pay for the article", b…

> edit: It didn't even occur to me to compare the time-cost of "just pay for the article", but: last I read, it's half an hour of work to cancel a New York Times subscription [0]. So, that option's not even on the table. I canceled mine two weeks ago. It was four clicks. One annoyed me because they tried to get me to stay with an offer, but I didn't drop them because of the price.

Same experience here, it was effortless. But it is enough to justify stealing from those journalists, it seems.
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