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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

#491

Post by theappsecguy »

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Whenever there is a story from NYT on HN (or any other large media outlet), the top comment is almost always a link to an archived version which reproduces the text verbatim.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

This seems very false to me. Spotify is the prime example. They offer a good product that covers a 100% of my needs at a reasonable price. If that was an option for say UFC or engineering books, you bet I’d be subscribed. But being forced to read through some crappy reader software when I need the book source to take annotations in another software doesn’t work, so here we are. Same with the absurd pay per view business model of UfC.

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

#492

Post by andy99 »

This, or a lawsuit like it is going to be the SCO vs IBM of the 2020's, to wit: a copyright troll trying to extract rent, with various special interests cheering it on to try and promote their own agenda (ironically it was Microsoft that played that role with SCO). It's funny how times have changed and at least now a louder group seem to be on the troll's side. I hope to see some better analysis on the frivolity of this come out. There may be some commercial subtlety in specific cases that doesn't depend on scraping and training, but fundamentally using public internet data for training is not copying, is fair use, and is better for society as a whole than whatever ridiculous alternative might be proposed.

edit: I'm speaking about training broadly capable foundation models like GPTn. It would of course be possible to build a model that only parrots copyrighted content and it would be hard to argue that is fair use.

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

#493

Post by ben_w »

pas wrote: post #195
heavyset_go wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

sure, but if I use an LLM to write a novel/article, I can be sued in civil court not the LLM. but, more importantly, OpenAI can also be sued for tortious interference? (basically the civil equivalent of accessory)

> sure, but if I use an LLM to write a novel/article, I can be sued in civil court not the LLM

That's function of the legal system, not of the technology. If tomorrow someone made a perfect dolphin-Esperanto translator and proved Dolphins were as smart as humans, you still can't sue a dolphin until the legal system says so.

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

#494

Post by eigenket »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #487
DennisP wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say OpenAI has exactly the same attitude, since they also pulled in thousands of books. Their position has been that it's not piracy, since they don't republish the books; effectively the AI just reads them and learns from them. If GPT can be made to reproduce the original articles, that's a more difficult argument to make.

It turns out you can reproduce articles with next-token prediction when the articles are quoted all over the dataset. The articles themselves are indisputably not a part of the model, because it doesn't store text at all. OpenAI's position is correct; people just underestimated how well the AI learns from reading, especially when it reads the same text in a bunch of different places because it's being quoted/excerpte…

If it can and does reproduce a piece of text verbatim then the text is indisputably stored somehow in the model.

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

#495

Post by Matticus_Rex »

octacat wrote: post #328
jalapenos wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ChatGPT is based on neural networks, with no actual save-and-replicate facsimile behaviour, it no more "copies" original work than I do when I tell you about the news article I read today. I'd say the only real reason the Piratebay links thing you mentioned is not the norm is purely because those media sources have done a better job of striking fear into people doing that, so it's gone more underground. I.e. they'…

So, if someone applies a filter to a video/audio, it is no more "copies" of the original work (no, it is still protected). AI still could produce exact or extremely similar results of stuff it learned on.

It's not analogous to a filter, because that's applied to the actual work. The model does not keep the work, so what it does isn't like applying a filter. It's more like being able to reproduce a version of the work from memory and what it learned from that work and others about the techniques involved in crafting it, e.g. art students doing reproductions.

And if OpenAI were selling the reproductions, that would be infringement. But that's not what's happening here. It's selling access to a system that can do countless things.

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

#496

Post by dannyr »

andy99 wrote: post #492

This, or a lawsuit like it is going to be the SCO vs IBM of the 2020's, to wit: a copyright troll trying to extract rent, with various special interests cheering it on to try and promote their own agenda (ironically it was Microsoft that played that role with SCO). It's funny how times have changed and at least now a louder group seem to be on the troll's side. I hope to see some better analysis on the frivolity of t…

NYTimes has a paywall. Is that public internet and therefore fair use?

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

#497

Post by hanselot »

I_Am_Nous wrote: post #490
DennisP wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say OpenAI has exactly the same attitude, since they also pulled in thousands of books. Their position has been that it's not piracy, since they don't republish the books; effectively the AI just reads them and learns from them. If GPT can be made to reproduce the original articles, that's a more difficult argument to make.

I can understand an argument about the AI needing to know basic history. News is just how we report history in the making, but it's not generally accepted as solid until some time after the events when we can get more context. Isn't this what the Associated Press is intended for, a stream of news trying to report just the facts and happenings of the day? That's quite a bit different than a NYT article intending to in…

Giving examples of bias is as important imo, give it the unbiased facts as well as the biased ones so it can generalise relative objectivity.

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

#498

Post by jamiek88 »

andy99 wrote: post #492

This, or a lawsuit like it is going to be the SCO vs IBM of the 2020's, to wit: a copyright troll trying to extract rent, with various special interests cheering it on to try and promote their own agenda (ironically it was Microsoft that played that role with SCO). It's funny how times have changed and at least now a louder group seem to be on the troll's side. I hope to see some better analysis on the frivolity of t…

Using the words troll and frivolous undermines your otherwise decent point and in fact goes against your point.

The law isn’t settled, it’s a genuine legal question mark.

It ain’t frivolous or trolling or ridiculous.

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

#499

Post by Vegenoid »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #56
bloppe wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you didn't read the article. Here's a better synoposis: I read a NYT article and publish an exact copy of that article on my website: copyright infringement. Train a model on NYT text and it outputs an exact copy of that text: also copyright infringement.

So presumably when they fix that issue (which, if the text matches exactly, should be trivially easy) then would you accept that as a sufficient remedy?

Copyright infringement is not avoided by changing some text so it isn’t an exact clone of the source.

Determining whether a work violates a copyright requires holistic consideration of the similarity of the work to the copyrighted material, the purpose of the work, and the work’s impact on the copyright holder.

There is not an algorithm for this, cases are decided on by people.

There are algorithms that could detect obvious violations of copyright, such as the one you suggest which looks for exact matches to copyrighted material. However, there are many potential outputs, or patterns of output, which would be copyright violation and would not be caught by this trivial test.

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

#500

Post by orbisvicis »

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 I can't read about it, it didn't happen.
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