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The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

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Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#11

Post by prepostertron »

Surprised they don't mention Bard anywhere in the article. I wonder if the NYT has worked out some sort of licensing deal with Google for Bard, or if Bard isn't trained on NYT data?

The lawsuit mentions this, so maybe they did work out some agreement to license their data: "For months, The Times has attempted to reach a negotiated agreement with Defendants, in accordance with its history of working productively with large technology platforms to permit the use of its content in new digital products (including the news products developed by Google, Meta, and Apple)."

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#12

Post by robg »

Can someone explain the technical difference between what search engines do to index newspapers versus what is being claimed here? Is the difference as simple as me being able to get summaries and content from a newspaper from GPT without needing to visit their website?

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#13

Post by mvcalder »

Does anyone know what the copyright status of LLM generated content is? That is, if I feed a NYT article into GPT4 and say, summarize this article, and then publish that summary, is there argument or precedent that says that is or is not copyright infringement? Asking for a friend.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#14

Post by greatNespresso »

I still believe there's a place for a marketplace that rewards creators and journalism for their content if used as part of AI training specifically. As part of my exploration of that idea with faie.io, I got in touch with one exec in the publishing industry to speak about this and the desire was there. What felt sad to me was the lack of awareness from publishers around the existential threat that conversational search will pose to their business.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#15

Post by falcor84 »

This is a wonderful holiday present. It's hard for me to imagine an outcome of this trial that I'd be against. Whoever loses (preferably both), it would be positive for society. It would even be great if the only outcome is that future LLM's are prohibited from using the NY Times's writing style.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#16

Post by cowsup »

fallingknife wrote: post #4

What are they arguing here? AFAIK reading copyrighted works is not copyright infringement. Copying and selling them is, as the name would suggest, but OpenAI absolutely did not do that. Are they trying to say that LLM training is a special type of reading that should be considered infringement? Seems like a weak case to me. edit: Would be very funny if OpenAI used an educational fair use defense

> AFAIK reading copyrighted works is not copyright infringement. [...] Are they trying to say that LLM training is a special type of reading that should be considered infringement?

Nobody can argue that OpenAI was feeding the content to ChatGPT because ChatGPT was bored or was curious about current events. It was fed NYT's content so it would know how to reproduce similar content, for profit.

I think getting a case-law in the books as to what is legal, and what is not, with LLMs, was inevitable. If it wasn't NYT suing ChatGPT, it would be another publisher, or another artist, whose work was used to "train" these systems.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#17

Post by kfk »

mritchie712 wrote: post #5

I'd bet they win, but how do you possibly measure the dollar amount? If you strip out 100% of NYT content from GPT-4, I don't think you'd notice a difference. But if you go domain by domain and continue stripping training data, the model will eventually get worse.

Take estimated losses of the NYT from this "innovation" and multiply by 10^x where is "x" high enough to make tech companies stop and think before they break laws next time. That would be my approach at least.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#18

Post by celdon25 »

falcor84 wrote: post #15

This is a wonderful holiday present. It's hard for me to imagine an outcome of this trial that I'd be against. Whoever loses (preferably both), it would be positive for society. It would even be great if the only outcome is that future LLM's are prohibited from using the NY Times's writing style.

I’m no fan of NYT but can you elaborate on this point? It is just a bare assertion.

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#19

Post by [deleted] »

batch12 wrote: post #3

> The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over claims the companies built their AI models by “copying and using millions” of the publication’s articles and now “directly compete” with the outlet’s content. Millions? Damn, they can churn out some content. 13 million[0]!. [0] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter... .

[deleted]

Re: The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

#20

Post by Aurornis »

The arguments about being able to mimic New York Times “style” are weak, but the fact that they got it to emit verbatim NY Times content seems bad for OpenAI:

> As outlined in the lawsuit, the Times alleges OpenAI and Microsoft’s large language models (LLMs), which power ChatGPT and Copilot, “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim

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