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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

#551

Post by zzzeek »

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Whenever there is a story from NYT on HN (or any other large media outlet), the top comment is almost always a link to an archived version which reproduces the text verbatim.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

it's different reading an NYT article on an archive site vs. putting copies of it at the core of your $100B for-profit content delivery enterprise.

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

#552

Post by briansm »

rickydroll wrote: post #513
Germont wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, there is a sense that the news, which is real information about the society that we currently live in, should be availabe to all participants of that society. The notion of being a good citizen requires that one stays informed. Books, movies, videogames etc. don't have that role and are more consumption goods.

I'm of a similar mind. I take the more expansive view that everything created is part of our common property and that something like an LLM should be able to yield the summary and references to those creations. As I've said elsewhere, LLM systems might be our first practical example of an infinite number of monkeys typing and recreating Shakespeare (or the New York Times). I understand that copyrights and patents are…

a LLM is just a hugely lossy-compressed version of its training data, an abstraction of it.

Much in the same way as when you read a book, your brain doesn't become a pirated copy of the text as you only store a hugely compressed version of it afterwards, a feeling for the plot, generated images and so on.

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

#553

Post by mark_l_watson »

I think Apple has really got ahead of this game: early deals to pay for AI training data/content. I need to do some research but I think Anthropic also does this.

After a year of largely using OpenAI APIs, I am now much more into smaller “open” models for I hope the major contributors like Meta/Facebook are following Apple’s lead. Off topic, but: even finding the smaller “open” models much less capable, they capture my imagination and my personal research time.

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

#554

Post by heavyset_go »

Robotbeat wrote: post #528
heavyset_go wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoever operates the LLM, in this case OpenAI, engaged in copyright infringement through the unauthorized modification, reproduction and distribution of content to you.

The person doing the requesting did.

That's not how interactive computer services work.

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

#555

Post by mark_l_watson »

edude03 wrote: post #501
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…

I think the intent is really different. For LLMs you're essentially teaching them language by showing them lots of examples of written language - newspapers are of course a great example of written language. The goal of OpenAI is not to reproduce newspaper articles verbatim when asked questions (even if the answer could be a newspaper article) and the fact that it can happen is a side effect of how LLMs work. When a…

Maybe LLMs should follow best practices for 1980s style backprop models and later deep learning models: starve model size to force maximum generalization, minimal remembering.

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

#556

Post by [deleted] »

theappsecguy wrote: post #491
tzs wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that's something worth reflecting on, about why we feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other IP As you noted it is not the norm to post pirate links here for IP other than news articles, but that doesn't mean that a lot of people think it is not OK to pirate those other forms of IP. In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video streaming there will be numerous posts from people ex…

This seems very false to me. Spotify is the prime example. They offer a good product that covers a 100% of my needs at a reasonable price. If that was an option for say UFC or engineering books, you bet I’d be subscribed. But being forced to read through some crappy reader software when I need the book source to take annotations in another software doesn’t work, so here we are. Same with the absurd pay per view busin…

[deleted]

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

#557

Post by vel0city »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #308
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…

Historically newspapers leaned more on competition law than copyright, because their pages are supposed to be filled with non-copyrightable facts.[1] Copying part, but not all, of a factual article, significantly after the relevant event, was considered to be a promotion (not unfair competition) and a nice thing to do for the journalists. Things change, people lose sight of the original principles. [1] https://en.m.w…

> their pages are supposed to be filled with non-copyrightable facts

This is rather inaccurate. A fact is Hitler invades Poland. You're right, nobody can copyright this idea, as it is just a fact.

However, if I then write a 500-word article describing the scene of Hitler invading Poland, have short quotes from some civilians there, etc. that particular arrangement of ideas and words is copyright.

AP can't go and sue INS for just reporting the fact Hitler invades Poland, but if INS takes a whole article word for word and reproduces it that's still violation of copyright. The actual printed words of the news always had copyright.

The WSJ can't claim copyright on the markets going up yesterday. They can claim copyright on something like "After the bell rang in the NYSE, the tech industry ticked up 1.2% over last week. Meanwhile the whatever market took a hit of -0.5% ending the quarter slightly lower than our analysis expected. Blah blah blah..." If Investor's Business Daily wrote a different article that also talked about the markets ending up at the end of the day, that's not a violation of copyright. If they literally write "After the bell rang in the NYSE, the tech industry ticked up..." then they're violating WSJ's copyright. This was true before and after International News Service v Associated Press.

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

#558

Post by edgyquant »

monkeynotes wrote: post #518
tzs wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that's something worth reflecting on, about why we feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other IP As you noted it is not the norm to post pirate links here for IP other than news articles, but that doesn't mean that a lot of people think it is not OK to pirate those other forms of IP. In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video streaming there will be numerous posts from people ex…

People used to leave newspapers in the trash, on the train, all over the place. Anyone could pick them up and read for free. I think it's reasonable for folks to carry this attitude into the digital age. People feel like news is something to share, it's not the source of creative expression, it's facts and as such we feel entitled to know the facts about our world and what is happening that might affect us.

No it isn’t reasonable and people not paying for that newspaper read anymore is the reason all news is sensationalist opinion pieces today.

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

#559

Post by kromem »

groceryheist wrote: post #41

The suit demonstrates instances where ChatGTP / Bing Copilot copy from the NYT verbatim. I think it is hard to argue that such copying constitutes "fair use". However, OAI/MS should be able to fix this within the current paradigm: Just learn to recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF. However, the suit goes far beyond claiming that such copying violates their copyright: "Unauthorized copying of Times Works without p…

This isn't an issue with training, it's an issue with usage.

Production open access LLMs do probably need a front-end filter with a fine tuned RAG model that identifies and prevents spitting out copyrighted material. I fully support this.

But we shouldn't be preventing the development of a technology that in 99.99% of usecases isn't doing that and can used for everything from diagnosing medical issues to letting coma patients communicate with an EEG to improving self-driving car algorithms because some random content producer's works were a drop in the ocean of content used to learn relationships between words and concepts.

The edge cases where a model is rarely capable of reproducing training data don't reflect infringement of training but of use. If a writer learns to write well from a source is that infringement? Or is it when they then write exactly what was in the source that it becomes infringement?

Additionally, now that we can use LLMs to read brain scans and have been moving towards biological computing, should we start to consider copying of material to the hippocampus a violation of the DMCA?

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

#560

Post by Kerb_ »

zwischenzug wrote: post #543
monkeynotes wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People used to leave newspapers in the trash, on the train, all over the place. Anyone could pick them up and read for free. I think it's reasonable for folks to carry this attitude into the digital age. People feel like news is something to share, it's not the source of creative expression, it's facts and as such we feel entitled to know the facts about our world and what is happening that might affect us.

That newspaper was likely paid for by someone, and could only be read by one person at a time.

While I'm well aware I'm being pedantic, me and my brothers would share the comics together while my parents kept the news, up to 4 of us consuming 1 paper at a time. Realistically, the reading limit was due to the physical properties of the object and not an inherent property of information to be consumed through one avenue at a time
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