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Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

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Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#141

Post by DirkH »

H8crilA wrote: post #86
Levitz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You don’t get to make information publicly available. But not publicly available. But we do? Open sourcing something with caveats is common. This code is public BUT not for commercial use. This code is public BUT you must display attribution etc. Sure, blogposts are unlicensed (that I know) but the idea of something publicly available being held to restrictions is nothing new.

Do you allow commercial employees to read the code and incorporate knowledge obtained from the code into their brains?

This is a fantastic point. I can legally go pick up any strictly copyrighted book at a store and read parts of it for free which I will then have learnt and have in my brain to share with to anyone else. If I happen to have a superintelligent brain I can potentially gain a lot more and make a lot more inferences from this one outing and consequently add a lot of value to others I share my info to.

But telling me it is illegal to share what I learnt because the original source is copyrighted... doesn't sit right with me.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#142

Post by TechBro8615 »

knaik94 wrote: post #35

>For the 16 plaintiffs, the complaint indicates that they used ChatGPT, as well as other internet services like Reddit, and expected that their digital interactions would not be incorporated into an AI model. I don't expect this lawsuit to lead anywhere. But if it does, I hope it leads to some clear laws regarding data privacy and how TOS is binding. The recent ruling regarding web scraping makes the case against Ope…

Regardless of access rights to the data, I've yet to read a compelling argument why LLMs are even derivative works. You can't identify your Reddit comment in a ChatGPT conversation. How is it any different than a human learning English by reading Reddit? That human wouldn't be violating copyright every time they said a phrase that was repeated by hundreds of Redditors.

My favorite LLM analogy so far is the "lossy jpeg of the web." Within that metaphor, I don't see how anyone can claim copyright on the basis of a pixel they contributed that doesn't even show up in the lossy jpeg. They can't point to it.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#144

Post by TechBro8615 »

kelipso wrote: post #90
knaik94 wrote: post #35

>For the 16 plaintiffs, the complaint indicates that they used ChatGPT, as well as other internet services like Reddit, and expected that their digital interactions would not be incorporated into an AI model. I don't expect this lawsuit to lead anywhere. But if it does, I hope it leads to some clear laws regarding data privacy and how TOS is binding. The recent ruling regarding web scraping makes the case against Ope…

These things are just not going to go anywhere, big reason being AI is part of the technological race. If AI research gets constrained in the US, progress will happen in China. Since that can't happen, this won't go anywhere.

I tend to agree with you, but I also recognize I could be unrealistically optimistic. This is the legal system we're talking about. I wouldn't expect every court case to be decided fairly, nor would I expect any new laws and regulations to necessarily be sensible. Frankly my biggest worry at this point is that regulatory capture from the first mover AI companies will stop me from purchasing more than one GPU.

I'm not too worried about copyright issues because regardless of whatever happens with upcoming case law and legislation, any regulation against the input data will be totally unenforceable. It's nearly impossible to detect whether or not an LLM was trained on some corpus of data (although maybe there is some "trap street" equivalent that could retroactively catch an LLM trained on data it wasn't allowed to read). And even if the weights of a model are found to be in violation of some copyright, it's still not enforceable to forbid them, because they're just a bag of numbers that can be torrented and used to surreptitiously power all sorts of black boxes. That's why I'm much more worried about legislative restrictions on hardware purchases.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#145

Post by mrtranscendence »

criddell wrote: post #134
mrtranscendence wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you could memorize and recite copyrighted works all you want, as long as you're doing it in an empty room without anyone listening.

Would you say reading a book to my kids before bed is illegal?

Sorry, I was being a little flip. There's more to it than that, of course. Is the performance sufficiently transformative, is it educational, is it non-profit, etc.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#146

Post by tedivm »

knaik94 wrote: post #84
tedivm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lawsuit is far more nuanced than you're letting on. There are several aspects that come into play- * Was it published publicly? This is basically defined in the courts as "if you make an unauthenticated web request does the data return?". This is where scraping comes in- if you make the data available without authentication you can't enforce your TOS, because you can't validate that people actually even accepted…

I agree that there is additional nuance, but so far public data scraping has very clearly been ruled as legal. It's possible that at the time of scraping, copyrighted data was incorporated into the training data because it hadn't been taken down by the host platform yet. But in my opinion, the core idea proposed by the suit that private data was used intentionally, is not true. The GPT4 browsing plugin is equivalent…

My point is that you have to separate the method for collecting the data versus the usage of the data as separate legal questions. Scraping is legal. What you do with the data that you scrap though is a whole other question.

To put it another way, it's legal for me to go to the library and borrow a DVD or a book or poems. That doesn't give me the right to publish the poems again under my own name. Whether I find the poems from scraping, borrowing the book from a library, or even just reading it off of a wall I don't get ownership rights to that data.

The same logic applies to a lot of other laws around data. If you collect data on individuals there are a bunch of laws that come up around it, and many of them don't really concern themselves with how you got the data so much as how you use it. The fact that it was scraped doesn't grant any special legal rights.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#147

Post by DirkH »

pessimizer wrote: post #59
data-ottawa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can personally memorize and recite copyrighted works all I want, but when ChatGPT does it then it’s in a commercial context and they’re liable to be sued for infringement. If you ask ChatGPT the rules for D&D, the private sourcebooks are all in there.

> I can personally memorize and recite copyrighted works all I want, Whoever told you that is lying to you. You are not legally allowed to personally memorize and recite copyrighted works all you want, any more than you're allowed to personally memorize, write down copyrighted works, and distribute them as much as you want. All piracy is a process of computer-assisted remembering and reciting.

Last I checked I can legally enter any bookstore with copyrighted books, pick up a book, and read it. And then tell anyone what I read.

I can't go write and commercialize what I learnt directly, but I'm not breaking the law by quickly seeing how some book I didn't buy ends so I can talk about it at a party - and then everyone knows how it ends which might affect whether they want to buy said book and upset the author. But, tough shit, what I did was legal. I can even use the ending as one set of input from dozens of inspirations for my own book where the end result is transformative enough where the sources are unrecognizable. And if I had learnt about the endings from a dozen books without buying those books I didn't break any laws even though I am now commercializing something in being inspired by them all to make something new.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#148

Post by tedivm »

judge2020 wrote: post #115
supermatt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope it leads to some clear laws regarding data privacy and how TOS is binding I hope it leads to more people realizing that a TOS doesnt override their individual rights and that the legal system works to support them.

One individual right is the right to sign away other rights in exchange for products and services.

Can you point to where that "right" is codified in law?

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#149

Post by codekansas »

barathr wrote: post #32

Rather than there being lawsuit after lawsuit of this sort, we wrote an op-ed this morning that says there should be a simple, compulsory licensing fee that AI companies pay to the public -- something we called the AI Dividend: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/29/ai-pay-ame...

1. How would this not make tools like Github Copilot exorbitantly expensive? Why should I have to pay a tax to everyone else in the United States to use something that was disproportionately trained on my own data?

2. Given that the internet is global, is every country supposed to make their own versions of this? Will I have to pay the EU tax to use models that might have been trained on data that Europeans posted online?

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#150

Post by knaik94 »

nameless_prole wrote: post #87
knaik94 wrote: post #35

>For the 16 plaintiffs, the complaint indicates that they used ChatGPT, as well as other internet services like Reddit, and expected that their digital interactions would not be incorporated into an AI model. I don't expect this lawsuit to lead anywhere. But if it does, I hope it leads to some clear laws regarding data privacy and how TOS is binding. The recent ruling regarding web scraping makes the case against Ope…

It becomes harder and harder to pretend that this level of data scraping and disregard for consumer privacy is acceptable when things like GDPR exist. Just because I posted something on reddit because I thought it was funny, doesn't implicitly give permission to anybody to take that post and profit from it. You're doing a disservice to consumers by acting like it's their fault for being exploited.

The fundamental issue in that situation isn't about profit, it's about the definition of what is considered publicly accessible and what consent that implies.

I disagree with you on whether it should count as being exploited. I don't see fanfiction writers professional impersonators or as inherently exploitative. I understand that some people would disagree because there is a difference in scale. But using technology to mimic and, in some sense, replace human effort is the reason it is useful.

I believe this will shift how and why people value organic media. The standard of what makes content "good" will rise in the long term. When stable diffusion first came out, I compared the generated art to the elevator music. I feel the same way about the output of LLMs. I might feel differently in a few years if models get better at the rate they currently have been, but that's not likely.

I agree that people should have more control over how their data is used, and I'd love to see this suit lead to stricter laws.

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