Live data from Hacker News

How Googlers cracked OpenAI's ChatGPT with a single word

sfgate.com

11–20 of 52 posts

Re: How Googlers cracked OpenAI's ChatGPT with a single word

#11
post #9
post #2

What's the endgame of this "AI models are trained on copyrighted data" stuff? I don't see how LLMs can work going forward if every copyright owner needs to be paid or asked for permission. Do they just want LLM development to stop?

Why should LLM development proceed if the only way it can is by violating copyright?

Well, like I said in another comment, some people believe we are on the brink of a new age of prosperity due to AI development. I'm not sure if I share that opinion - just playing devil's advocate.

Re: How Googlers cracked OpenAI's ChatGPT with a single word

#12
post #2

What's the endgame of this "AI models are trained on copyrighted data" stuff? I don't see how LLMs can work going forward if every copyright owner needs to be paid or asked for permission. Do they just want LLM development to stop?

Either buy rights to the data, produce training data for which you own the rights or use copyright-free data. Those options exist, but no one takes advantage of them because none of them are as much of a "free money machine" as just ripping off as many people as possible to homogenize and commodify their work.

If LLM development can't continue without violating copyright then that makes it clear that the purpose of LLM development is violation of copyright. Which is something we all already knew but it's nice to have it spelled out in no uncertain terms.

Re: How Googlers cracked OpenAI's ChatGPT with a single word

#13
post #9
post #2

What's the endgame of this "AI models are trained on copyrighted data" stuff? I don't see how LLMs can work going forward if every copyright owner needs to be paid or asked for permission. Do they just want LLM development to stop?

Why should LLM development proceed if the only way it can is by violating copyright?

Imo the world needs to find a way past the absurd notion of intellectual property.In a digital world where all collective knowledge is available at anyone's fingerprints ideas like copyright are anachronistic.

Re: How Googlers cracked OpenAI's ChatGPT with a single word

#14
post #2

What's the endgame of this "AI models are trained on copyrighted data" stuff? I don't see how LLMs can work going forward if every copyright owner needs to be paid or asked for permission. Do they just want LLM development to stop?

It's moreso copyright for me but not for thee.

Re: How Googlers cracked OpenAI's ChatGPT with a single word

#15
post #9
post #2

What's the endgame of this "AI models are trained on copyrighted data" stuff? I don't see how LLMs can work going forward if every copyright owner needs to be paid or asked for permission. Do they just want LLM development to stop?

Why should LLM development proceed if the only way it can is by violating copyright?

"Violating copyright" is a completely imaginary problem. We have a somewhat arbitrary set of laws, rules, guidelines and social norms about using existing ideas.

American law for instance has limits on the duration of copyright before something becomes public domain, explicit exemptions for "fair use" for education, journalistic reporting, commentary, etc.

If "copyright" is a problem in the way of training AI models, then we should all collectively vote for politicians who fix that problem by updating the laws to make the training explicitly allowed. Problem solved.

(Alternatively, if you're evil, vote for politicians who will let the billionaires strengthen their domination and subjugation of the other 99.9999% of humans by making copyright laws even more in favor of TimeWarner-Disney-Miramax-FoxNews-Lockheed-GE or whatever the current conglomerate is).

Re: How Googlers cracked OpenAI's ChatGPT with a single word

#16
Recent and related:

Scalable extraction of training data from (production) language models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38496715 - Dec 2023 (12 comments)

Extracting training data from ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38458683 - Nov 2023 (126 comments)

Re: How Googlers cracked OpenAI's ChatGPT with a single word

#17
post #2

What's the endgame of this "AI models are trained on copyrighted data" stuff? I don't see how LLMs can work going forward if every copyright owner needs to be paid or asked for permission. Do they just want LLM development to stop?

> I don't see how LLMs can work going forward if every copyright owner needs to be paid or asked for permission.

Simple, LLM development leadership shifts to open-source models and/or organizations/countries that are willing to bend or ignore copyright law. Silicon Valley isn't the world, neither is the United States.

Re: How Googlers cracked OpenAI's ChatGPT with a single word

#18
post #9
post #2

What's the endgame of this "AI models are trained on copyrighted data" stuff? I don't see how LLMs can work going forward if every copyright owner needs to be paid or asked for permission. Do they just want LLM development to stop?

Why should LLM development proceed if the only way it can is by violating copyright?

Why should copyright law be as it is if it means we can't have artificial intelligence?

Re: How Googlers cracked OpenAI's ChatGPT with a single word

#19
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should LLM development proceed if the only way it can is by violating copyright?

"Violating copyright" is a completely imaginary problem. We have a somewhat arbitrary set of laws, rules, guidelines and social norms about using existing ideas. American law for instance has limits on the duration of copyright before something becomes public domain, explicit exemptions for "fair use" for education, journalistic reporting, commentary, etc. If "copyright" is a problem in the way of training AI models,…

It's not a completely imaginary problem or a problem only affecting big corporations. If I'm an individual writer or artist and my work gets fed into an LLM against my will it can seriously undercut the value of that work or discourage me from creating more.

If you can just ask the LLM to give you the contents of my book you are less likely to buy it, and if you can just ask the image generator to generate an image in my unique style for free you won't want to buy my artwork.

I think it makes perfect sense that a model needs a specific license to train on my work, especially if the model is run by a massive corporation making a profit off it, and the model after downloading a copy of my work and "training" can reproduce it verbatim on request.

Re: How Googlers cracked OpenAI's ChatGPT with a single word

#20
I'm not sure how this is an attack. Is it actually vital that models don't repeat their training data verbatim? Often that's exactly the answer the user will want. We are all used to a similar "model" of the internet that does that: search engines. And it's expected and required that they work this way.

OpenAI argue that they can use copyrighted content so repeating that isn't going to change anything. The only issue would be if they had used stolen/confidential data to train on, and it was discovered that way, but it also seems unlikely anyone could easily detect that given that there'd be nothing to intersect it with, unlike in this paper.

The blog post seems to slide around quite a bit, roving from "it's not surprising to us that small amounts of random text is memorized" straight to "it's unsafe and surprising and nobody knew". The nobody knew idea, as Jimmc414 has nicely proven in this thread, is false alarm because their technique actually was detected and the paper authors just didn't know that it had been. And "it's unsafe" doesn't make any sense in this context. Repeating random bits of memorized text surrounded by huge amounts of original text isn't a safety problem. Nor is it an "exploit" that needs to be "patched". OpenAI could ignore this problem and nobody would care except AI alignment researchers.

The culture of alarmism in AI research is vaguely reminiscent of the early Victorians who argued that riding trains might be dangerous, because at such high speeds the air could be sucked out of the carriages.

Post reply on HN