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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

#531

Post by aantix »

jquery wrote: post #480
pxoe wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a computer isn't a human. aren't computers good at storing data? why can't they just store that data? they literally have sources in datasets. why can't they just reference those sources? human analogies are cute, but they're completely irrelevant. it doesn't change that it's specifically about computers, and doesn't change or excuse how computers work.

LLMs are not databases. There is no "citation" associated with a specific query, any more than you can cite the source of the comment you just made.

That's fine. Solve it a different way.

OpenAI doesn't just get to steal work and then say "sorry, not possible" and shrug it off.

The NYTimes should be suing.

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

#532

Post by jillesvangurp »

Aurornis wrote: post #20

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

Copyright is not about ideas, style, etc. but about the concrete shape and form of content. Patents and trademarks are for the rest. But this is a copyright centric case.

A lawsuit that proves verbatim copies, might have a point. But then there is the notion of fair use, which allows hip hop artists to sample copyrighted material, allows journalists to cite copyrighted literature and other works, and so on. There are a lot of existing rulings on this. Legally, it's a bit of a dog's breakfast where fair use stops and infringement begins. Upfront, the NYT's case looks very weak.

A lot of art and science is inherently derivative and inspired by earlier work. So is art. AI insights aren't really any different. That's why fair use exists. Society wouldn't be able to function without it. Fair remuneration extents only to the exact form and shape you published in for a limited amount of time and not much else. Publishing page and page of NYT content would be a clear infringement. But a citation here and there, or a bit of summary, paraphrasing, etc. not so much.

The ultimate outcome of this is simply models that exclude any NYT content. I think they are overestimating the impact that would have. IMHO it would barely register if their content were to be excluded.

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

#533

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Aurornis wrote: post #20

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

While I think the verbatim text strengthens NYTimes argument, I think people are focusing on that too strongly, the idea being that if OpenAI could just "fix" that, then they'd be in the clear.

Search for "four factors of fair use", e.g. https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/, which courts use to decide if a derived work is fair use. I think OpenAI will get killed in that fourth factor, "the effect of the use upon the potential market", which is what this case is really about. If the use substantially negatively affects the market for the original work, which I think it's easy to argue that it does, that is a huge factor against awarding a fair use exemption to OpenAI.

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

#534

Post by CaptainFever »

belter wrote: post #304
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This suggests to me that copyright laws are becoming out of date. The original intent was to provide an incentive for human authors to publish work, but has become more out of touch since the internet allowed virtually free publishing and copying. I think with the dawn of LLMs, copyright law is now mainly incentivising lawyers.

Maybe a specific example will help here. An Author spends a year writing a technical book, researching subtle technical issues, creating original code and finding novel ways of explaining difficult abstractions. A few weeks after the release it finds books on Amazon who plagiarized the book. Finds copies of the book available for free from Russian sites, and ChatGPT spitting verbatim parts of the source code on the b…

The expectation to make money from artificially restricting an abundant resource. While copyright is a way to create funding, it also massively harms society by restricting future creators from being able to freely reuse previous works. Modern ways to deal with this are patronage, government funding, foundations (e.g. NLNet) and crowdfunding.

Also, plagiarism has nothing to do with copyright. It has to do with attribution. This is easily proven: you can plagiarise Beethoven's music even though it's public domain.

https://questioncopyright.org/minute-memes-credit-is-due

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

#535

Post by FredPret »

Tao3300 wrote: post #515
dlandis wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no way to know what sources have been memorized vs which have made their mark by affecting other types of functions in the neural net. But if it's possible for the neural net to memorize passages of text then surely it could also memorize where it got those passages of text from. Perhaps not with today's exact models and technology, but if it was a requirement then someone would figure out a way to do it.

Neural nets don't memorize passages of text. They train on vectorized tokens. You get a model of how language statistically works, not understanding and memory.

You can encode understanding in a vector.

To use Andrew Ng's example, you have build a multi-dimensional arrow representing "king". You compare it to the arrow for "queen" and you see that it's almost identical, except it points in the opposite direction in the gender dimension. Compare it to "man" and you see that "king" and "man" have some things in common, but "man" is a broader term.

That's getting really close to understanding as far as I'm concerned; especially if you have a large number of such arrows. It's statistical in a literal sense, but it's more like the computer used statistics to work out the meaning of each word by a process of elimination and now actually understands it.

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

#536

Post by kevincox »

ngetchell wrote: post #372
solardev wrote: post #313

I hope this results in Fair Use being expanded to cover AI training. This is way more important to humanity's future than any single media outlet. If the NYT goes under, a dozen similar outlets can replace them overnight. If we lose AI to stupid IP battles in its infancy, we end up handicapping probably the single most important development in human history just to protect some ancient newspaper. Then another country…

"probably the single most important development in human history" is the kind of hyperbole you'd only find here. Better than medicine, agriculture, electrification, or music? That point of view simply does not jive with what I see so far from AI. It has had little impact beyond filling the internet with low-effort content. I feel like the crypto evangelists never got off the hype train. They just picked a new destina…

I think you are looking at current AI product rather than the underlying technology. It's like saying that the wheel is a useless invention because it has only been used for unicycles so far. I'm sure that AI will have huge impacts in medicine (assisting diagnosis from medical tests) and agriculture (identifying issues with areas of crops, scanning for diseases and increasing automation of food processing) as well as likely nearly every other field.

I don't know if I would agree that it is "probably the single most important development in human history" but I think that it is way to early to make a reasonable guess of if it will or not.

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

#537

Post by CaptainFever »

tsimionescu wrote: post #514
denton-scratch wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All evidence suggests that it's completely impossible to live off your work unless you copyright it for some reasonable period Which evidence?

The fact that it has never been done successfully outside performance arts.

That's a large category that includes everything from YouTubers to furry artists to live concerts.

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

#538

Post by whichfawkes »

aantix wrote: post #327
solardev wrote: post #313

I hope this results in Fair Use being expanded to cover AI training. This is way more important to humanity's future than any single media outlet. If the NYT goes under, a dozen similar outlets can replace them overnight. If we lose AI to stupid IP battles in its infancy, we end up handicapping probably the single most important development in human history just to protect some ancient newspaper. Then another country…

Why can't AI at least cite its source? This feels like a broader problem, nothing specific to the NYTimes. Long term, if no one is given credit for their research, either the creators will start to wall off their content or not create at all. Both options would be sad. A humane attribution comment from the AI could go a long way - "I think I read something about this in the NYTimes on January 3rd, 2021." It appears t…

Why do you expect an AI to cite it's source? Humans are allowed to use and profit on knowledge they've learned from any and all sources without having to mention or even remember their sources.

Yes, we all agree that it's better if they do remember and mention their sources, but we don't sue them for failing to do so.

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