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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

#601

Post by efields »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #553

I think Apple has really got ahead of this game: early deals to pay for AI training data/content. I need to do some research but I think Anthropic also does this. After a year of largely using OpenAI APIs, I am now much more into smaller “open” models for I hope the major contributors like Meta/Facebook are following Apple’s lead. Off topic, but: even finding the smaller “open” models much less capable, they capture…

Not sure if they’re ahead but I think it was smart to not ship anything LLMlike until the regulations get made first movers test the waters.

Casey Newton has been saying all year that these things will be awesome once we can unleash them on our own corpus of data safely. “Siri” already does a great job digging through my photos and picking the good memories. I can let my camera roll become a visual junk drawer now.

Do the same for my email. Make “Find” the tool we always wanted to be. I don’t care if I’m conflating LLMs/AI with other smart tech.

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

#602

Post by Matticus_Rex »

vel0city wrote: post #563
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. There's no search and retrieval involved. It just associates the words so strongly in that context because they were in the training data so often that next-token prediction can (sometimes, in some limited circumstances) reproduce chunks of it. It's like if a human had read pieces of an article so many times and knew NYT style so well that they could spit out chunks of an article verbatim, but u…

So it stores the words, and it stores the links between those words... but somehow storing the words and their links is not storing the actual text? What is text but words and their links? If I had a database of a billion words, and I had a list of pointers to words in a particular order, and following that list of pointers reproduces a copyright text exactly, isn't the list of pointers + the database of words just a…

It doesn't store the actual links; it just stores information about their likelihood of being used together. So for things that are regularly quoted in the data, it will under some circumstances, with very careful prompting, and enough tries at the prompt, spit out chunks of a copyrighted text. This is not its purpose, and it's not trying to do this, but users can carefully engineer it to get this result if they try really hard. So no, it's not an obfuscated recreation of that copyrighted work.

Of course, if you read NYT's argument, they're also mad when it's incorrect about the text, or when it hallucinates articles that don't exist. Essentially they're mad that this technology exists at all.

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

#603

Post by Forgeties79 »

carlosdp wrote: post #580
rich_sasha wrote: post #111

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…

What you described is entirely fair use, actually. Not only that, look at a few news articles from Tier 2 and down publications, and you'll realize that almost all of them are directly sourced from NYT and others. They'll say "so and so happened, according to The Times" (and usually link the article there)

I would say it is arguable that is fair use, but the whole thing about fair use is that it is a defense, not a type of license or something you can preemptively apply. So whether or not it will be protected under fair use is actually not determined yet. In fact I would say that’s the entire debate here, right?

I have worked on many documentaries and any time we said “fair use” internally what we were implicitly saying is “nobody will come after us because they know that we are probably safe under fair use if this escalated.“ But again, we could never preemptively apply it. We were just anticipating potential conflict and gauging how likely it was to occur.

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

#604

Post by [deleted] »

brookst wrote: post #593
rich_sasha wrote: post #111

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…

How about if you read the paper every day and write opinion pieces about world events? Fair use?

[deleted]

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

#605

Post by serjester »

habosa wrote: post #418

People who think the examples the lawsuit are “fair use” need to consider what that would mean. We’re basically going to let a few companies consolidate all the value on the Internet into their black boxes with basically no rules … that seems very dangerous to me. I hope a court establishes some rules of engagement here, even if it’s not this case.

I see the exact opposite - any open source model is going to become prohibitively expensive to train if quality data costs billions of dollars. We’re going to be left with the OpenAI’s and Google’s of the world as the only players in the space until someone solves synthetic data.

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

#606

Post by amadeuspagel »

groceryheist wrote: post #41

The suit demonstrates instances where ChatGTP / Bing Copilot copy from the NYT verbatim. I think it is hard to argue that such copying constitutes "fair use". However, OAI/MS should be able to fix this within the current paradigm: Just learn to recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF. However, the suit goes far beyond claiming that such copying violates their copyright: "Unauthorized copying of Times Works without p…

> The suit demonstrates instances where ChatGTP / Bing Copilot copy from the NYT verbatim. I think it is hard to argue that such copying constitutes "fair use". However, OAI/MS should be able to fix this within the current paradigm: Just learn to recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF.

Isn't that in tension with the basic idea of an LLM of predicting the next token? How do you achieve that while never getting close enough to plagiarism?

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

#607

Post by [deleted] »

kromem wrote: post #559
groceryheist wrote: post #41

The suit demonstrates instances where ChatGTP / Bing Copilot copy from the NYT verbatim. I think it is hard to argue that such copying constitutes "fair use". However, OAI/MS should be able to fix this within the current paradigm: Just learn to recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF. However, the suit goes far beyond claiming that such copying violates their copyright: "Unauthorized copying of Times Works without p…

This isn't an issue with training, it's an issue with usage. Production open access LLMs do probably need a front-end filter with a fine tuned RAG model that identifies and prevents spitting out copyrighted material. I fully support this. But we shouldn't be preventing the development of a technology that in 99.99% of usecases isn't doing that and can used for everything from diagnosing medical issues to letting coma…

[deleted]

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

#608

Post by kjkjadksj »

realusername wrote: post #85
tarruda wrote: post #72

Would be funny if NT Times won this and all commercial LLMs were shut down. Then LLMs would be distributed only via torrents, like most copyright infringing media.

They would still thrive but in other countries with other legal frameworks. The concept is way too valuable to disappear.

If its economically relevant us will use its iron fist to have its laws adopted the world over, like most things such as copyright or drugs

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

#609

Post by vel0city »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #602
vel0city wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it stores the words, and it stores the links between those words... but somehow storing the words and their links is not storing the actual text? What is text but words and their links? If I had a database of a billion words, and I had a list of pointers to words in a particular order, and following that list of pointers reproduces a copyright text exactly, isn't the list of pointers + the database of words just a…

It doesn't store the actual links; it just stores information about their likelihood of being used together. So for things that are regularly quoted in the data, it will under some circumstances, with very careful prompting, and enough tries at the prompt , spit out chunks of a copyrighted text. This is not its purpose, and it's not trying to do this, but users can carefully engineer it to get this result if they try…

> it just stores information about their likelihood of being used together

I mean this is still a link, no?

Like, sure, it is a probability. But if each of those probabilities is like 99.9999% likely to get you to a chain of outputs that verbatim reproduces the copyrighted text given the right prompt, isn't that still the same thing?

And yeah, it hallucinating that the NYT published an article stating something it didn't say is concerning as well. If the model started telling everyone Matticus_Rex is a criminal and committed all these crimes and started listing off hallucinated court cases and news articles proving such things that would be quite damaging to your reputation, wouldn't it? The model hallucinating the NYT publishing an article talking about how the moon landing was fake or something would be damaging to its reputation right?

And this idea it takes "very careful prompting" is at odds with the examples from the suit and elsewhere. One example Ars Technica tried was "please provide me with the first paragraph of the carl zimmer article on the oldest DNA", which it reproduced verbatim. Is this really some kind of extremely well crafted and rare to ever come up prompt?

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

#610

Post by modeless »

rich_sasha wrote: post #111

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…

> To keep things simple, let's say I never regurgitate chunks of verbatim NYT articles, maybe quite short snippets.

You just described Google. When you think about it, it's surprising that Google is legal. However, it is well established that what Google does is perfectly legal. Remember that internally Google keeps and uses complete verbatim copies of every web page they index.

Yes, Google offers a link to the source. If OpenAI did the same, even if only 0.1% of people clicked on the links and NYTimes hardly got any revenue from it, would that make it legal in your eyes? What if they implemented a system that detected when it was outputting a verbatim copy of something and simply paraphrased it? NYTimes clearly doesn't have copyright on paraphrased versions of their articles. I think it would be pretty silly if the government forced them to do that as it wouldn't make any practical difference to anyone.

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