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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

#551

Post by jjtheblunt »

mbrumlow wrote: post #78
jjtheblunt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I imagine that Gmail makes google very very special in this regard

Except Gmail does not own the copyrights to the email. So in the context to this article and theme of the post, the owner of the data is king. I don’t think any court would rule Google owned a novel sent over Gmail, little alone the contents of more normative emails.

from the Google Terms of Service ( https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US ), makes me wonder who owns what, since users of Gmail agree to it.

"We also collect the content you create, upload, or receive from others when using our services. This includes things like email you write and receive, photos and videos you save, docs and spreadsheets you create, and comments you make on YouTube videos."

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

#552

Post by sam_lowry_ »

adrr wrote: post #508
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't robots.txt enough to enforce copyright etc? If NYT didn't set robots.txt properly, is their content free-for-all? Yes I know the first answer you would jump to is "of course not, copyright is the default", but it's almost 2024 and we have had robots.txt as industry de jure to stop crawling.

Robot.txt isn't about copyrights, its about preventing bots. Its effectively a EULA. Copyright law only goes into effect when you distribute the content you scrape. If you scraped New York times for your own LLM that you used internally and didn't distribute the results, there would be no copyright infringement.

Er... This is what all these lawsuits against LLMs are hoping to disprove

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

#553

Post by throwup238 »

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…

If you ask the AI to cite its sources, it will. It will hallucinate some of them, but in the last few months it's gotten really good at sending me to the right web page or Amazon book link for its sources.

Thing is though, if you look at the prompts they used to elicit the material, the prompt was already citing the NYTimes and its articles by name.

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

#554

Post by Tao3300 »

pxoe wrote: post #429
KHRZ wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a question, do you remember a source for all the knowledge in your mind, or did you at least try to remember?

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.

You'd effectively be asking it to cite sources on why the next token is statistically likely. Then it will hallucinate anyway and tell you the NYT said so. You might think you want this, but you don't.

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

#555

Post by passwordoops »

rand1239 wrote: post #287
jprete wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exact words used to explain the scientific law are copyrighted by the writer (presumably the paper's authors). Rephrasings are not copywrited by the source, but by the rephrasing entity (e.g. the NYT, or a teacher that made a handout for their class). Copyright on scientific papers is most definitely a thing, by the way.

If the bar for copyright is as low as ordering of words, then I don't even know what to say.

So stop saying anything. Go learn how copyright works in the real world

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

#556

Post by abduhl »

vivekd wrote: post #491
ngetchell wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what industries with what application? I've seen lots of task like summarizing articles or producing text. The image and video work seems too rudimentary to be taken seriously. Is there something out there that seems like a killer application? I was amazed at the idea of the block chain but we never found a use for it outside of cryptocurrency. I see a similariy with AI hype.

Well front page of HN right now is an article about how AI aided in the development of a new antibiotic

Seems like Microsoft Excel is likely the single most important development in human history under this rubric.

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

#557

Post by rand1239 »

charonn0 wrote: post #549
rand1239 wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News media like NYT, Fox etc are tools for high scale brainwashing public by the elite. This is why you see all the News papers have some political ideology. If they were reporting on truth and not opinions they won't have the need for leaning. Also you never see the journalists reporting against their own publication. Humanity is better off without these mass brainwashing systems. Millions of independent journalists…

Honestly, this sounds like a conspiracy theory and/or an attempt to deflect criticism from the AI companies.

Ohh. You think being owner of a company whose newspaper is read by hundreds of millions of people every day, doesn't put you in a position of power to control the society?

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

#558

Post by CaptainFever »

hackerlight wrote: post #374
lp4vn wrote: post #21

For me it's quite obvious that if you make a profit from an engine that has as an input copyrighted material, then you owe something to the owner of this copyrighted content. We have seen this same problem with artists claiming stable diffusion engines were using their art.

I think we're in a new paradigm and need to look at this differently. The end goal is to train models on all the output of humanity. Everyone will have contributed to it (artists, writers, coders on github... the people who taught the writers, the people who invented the English language, the people who created the daily events that were reported on, etc). We're better off letting ML companies free access to almost e…

Copyright Is Brain Damage by Nina Paley [1] claimed that culture is like a bunch of neurons passing and evolving data to each other, and copyright is like severing the ties between the neurons, like brain damage. It also presented [2] an alternative way of viewing art and science, as products of the common culture, not a product purely from the creator, to be privatised. This sounds really relevant to your comment.

Furthermore, if we manage to "untrain" AI on certain pieces of content, then copyright would really become "brain" damage too. Like, the perceptrons and stuff.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc

[2] No, I'm not an AI, just autistic.

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

#559

Post by JCM9 »

aragonite wrote: post #404
JCM9 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing back large passages of verbatim content sold as your “product” without citation is almost certainly not fair use. Fair use would be saying “The New York Times said X” and then quoting a sentence with attribution. Thats not what OpenAI is being sued for. They’re being sued for passing off substantial bits of NYTimes content as their own IP and then charging for it saying it’s their own IP. This is also related…

> They’re being sued for passing off substantial bits of NYTimes content as their own IP and then charging for it saying it’s their own IP. In what sense are they claiming their generated contents as their own IP? https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-the-code-if-chatgpts-... > OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) does not claim ownership of generated content. According to their terms of service, "OpenAI hereby assig…

The bits you cite are legally bogus.

That would be like me just photocopying a book you wrote and then handing out copies saying we’re assigning different rights to the content. The whole point of the lawsuit is that OpenAI doesn’t own the content and thus they can’t just change the ownership rights per their terms of service. It doesn’t work like that.

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

#560

Post by skepticATX »

sensanaty wrote: post #294
gwright wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you study copyrighted material for four years at a university and then go on to earn money based on your education, do you owe something to the authors of your text books? I'm not sure how we should treat LLMs with respect to publicly accessible but copyrighted material, but it seems clear to me that "profiting" from copyrighted material isn't a sufficient criteria to cause me to "owe something to the owner".

Do people ever get tired of this argument that relies on anthropomorphizing these AI black boxes? A computer isn't a human, and we already have laws that have a different effect depending on if it's a computer doing it or a human. LLMs are no different, no matter how catchy hyping them up as being == Humans may be.

Great comment. The amount of anthropomorphizing that goes on in these threads is just baffling to me.

It seems obvious to me that, despite what current law says, there is something not right about what large companies are doing when they create LLMs.

If they are going to build off of humanity's collective work, their product should benefit all of humanity, and not just shareholders.

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