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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

#231

Post by Popeyes »

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Whenever there is a story from NYT on HN (or any other large media outlet), the top comment is almost always a link to an archived version which reproduces the text verbatim.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

Possibly because once an article is published the author receives no further payment. In all other mediums, there are residuals and royalties to be paid to the creators of the work.

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

#232

Post by stevenhuang »

JambalayaJim wrote: post #94
echelon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well yeah, copying a work and using it for its original expressive purpose isn’t fair use, no? You have to use it for a transformative purpose. They transformed the weights. Just like reading the article transforms yours . As for verbatim reproduction, I'm pretty sure brains are capable of reproducing song lyrics, musical melodies, common symbols ("cool S"), and lots of other things verbatim too. Those quotes from…

This comment is just blatant anthropomorphizing of ML models. You have no idea if reading an article “transforms weights” in a human mind, and regardless, they aren’t legally the same thing anyway.

Modern neuroscience does highly suggest this is essentially what's happening.

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

#234

Post by manojlds »

Popeyes wrote: post #231
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Whenever there is a story from NYT on HN (or any other large media outlet), the top comment is almost always a link to an archived version which reproduces the text verbatim.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…

Possibly because once an article is published the author receives no further payment. In all other mediums, there are residuals and royalties to be paid to the creators of the work.

And add to that fact that NYT subscription is hard to unsubscribe from. People have aversion to NYT, even setting aside the bias.

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

#235

Post by Jensson »

ralfd wrote: post #213
laborcontract wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that it’s not necessarily legal, but going after bloggers and proving damages based is just a huge waste of their time. OpenAI came by with their fat stack of funding and changed that.

What parent poster meant is that it is normal that news organisations reference each other and report/cite/rephrase each other reports. For example all other news papers reported about the Watergate scandal reported by Bernstein&Woodward in the Washington Post.

Those cite the original source that they used to write the article, the gpt models don't.

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

#236

Post by perihelions »

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 it takes 120 seconds to read a newspaper article, the archive.is workflow is a significant overhead over that, a significant friction. Those links are a courtesy to other HN readers. This is very different from the economics of buying and reading a book.

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."

edit: It didn't even occur to me to compare the time-cost of "just pay for the article", but: last I read, it's half an hour of work to cancel a New York Times subscription [0]. So, that option's not even on the table.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26174269 ("Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it", 812 comments)

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

#237

Post by EMIRELADERO »

chris_wot wrote: post #228

Fair use is something Wikipedians dance around a fair amount. It also meant I did a lot of reading about it. It’s a four part test. Let’s examine it thusly: 1. Transformative. Is it? It spits out informative text and opinion. The only “transformation” is that its generative text. IMO that’s a fail. 2. Nature of the work - it’s being used commercially. Given it’s being trained partially on editorial, that’s creative e…

You're getting mixed up. When applying the four factors, you need to individually separate all the uses. So you would need to repeat the fair use test for every alleged type of infringement. This means that the scraping from the public internet to OpenAI's dataset storage cluster is one instance where the full analysis of the 4 must take place, then the training itself, so another full analysis, then the distribution of model outputs, another one, etc.

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

#238

Post by wokwokwok »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #139
heavyset_go wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another factor to consider is that neural nets can function as lossy compression, which becomes extremely evident when using models that are overfit. Sometimes they're so overfit that the compression isn't even lossy, and the data is encoded verbatim in the NN.

Yes, but this then hits against learning/understanding and compression being fundamentally the same thing . I can't think of a better way to argue in favor of "it's fine if human does it, therefore it's fine if LLM does it", than from the "lossy compression" angle.

Is there some LLM meta where understanding and compression are argued to be the same thing I’m not aware of?

Anyone got more details on this?

Superficially it sounds like total BS; a highly compressed zip file does not exhibit any characteristics of learning.

Algorithmically derived highly compressed video streams do not exhibit characteristics of learning.

?

I’ve vaguely heard the learning can be considered to exhibit the characteristics of compression in that understanding of content (eg. segmentation of video content resulting in more highly compressed videos) can lead to better compression schemes.

…but saying you can “do a with b” and “a and b are fundamentally the same thing” seems like a leap…?

It seems self evident you can have compression without comprehension.

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

#239

Post by BlueTemplar »

tsimionescu wrote: post #181
logicchains wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. >Is that fair use? IANAL, but doesn't sound like it. If you pay someone to do the summarisation for you, then you publish the content and charge a fee for it, you're the one liable, not the person you paid to summarise it for you. Similarly if you ask GPT to do it…

That's not true at all. If you pay someone to copy NYT articles for you verbatim, and then they give the copies to you, and then you publish them online, then you've both violated the copyright. You are never allowed to make copies of copyrighted works, even for private deals (making such copies for purely personal use, such as archival, falls under fair use - but you can't build a service out of that). So, if the su…

Also, ChatGPT isn't a person with rights and duties. The people that made it are responsible for it.

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

#240

Post by contravariant »

globular-toast wrote: post #177

> To me, reading a book, putting it in some storage system, and then recalling it to form future thoughts is fair use. It's what we all do all the time, and I think that's exactly what training is. If the AI can recall the text verbatim then it's not at all the same. When we read we are not able to reproduce the book from our memory. Even if a human could memorise an entire book it's not at all practical to reproduce…

Yeah the comparison to humans is silly anthropomorphising at this point.

However I am inclined to agree with them for the simple fact that putting a file into a device and letting that device reproduce parts of the file should be allowed. I mean we're already at the point where this simple right is under pressure from DRM, but people should be allowed to do whatever they want with the files they own.

Whether you can publish this output and share it with the world is a whole different issue.

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