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Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

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Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#91

Post by thinkingtoilet »

gruez wrote: post #47
Forgeties79 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>your data belongs to you …”as does any culpability for poisoning yourself, suicide, and anything else we clearly enabled but don’t want to be blamed for!” Edit: honestly I’m surprised I left out the bit where they just indiscriminately scraped everything they could online to train these models. The stones to go “your data belongs to you” as they clearly feel entitled to our data is unbelievably absurd

>…”as does any culpability for poisoning yourself, suicide, and anything else we clearly enabled but don’t want to be blamed for!” Should walmart be "culpable" for selling rope that someone hanged themselves with? Should google be "culpable" for returning results about how to commit suicide?

That depends. Does the rope encourage vulnerable people to kill themselves and tell them how to do it? If so, then yes.

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#92

Post by Workaccount2 »

jcranmer wrote: post #38
rpdillon wrote: post #13

I wouldn't want to make it out like I think OpenAI is the good guy here. I don't. But conversations people thought they were having with OpenAI in private are now going to be scoured by the New York Times' lawyers. I'm aware of the third party doctrine and that if you put something online it can never be actually private. But I think this also runs counter to people's expectations when they're using the product. In c…

> In copyright cases, typically you need to show some kind of harm. NYT is suing for statutory copyright infringement. That means you only need to demonstrate that the copyright infringement, since the infringement alone is considered harm; the actual harm only matters if you're suing for actual damages. This case really comes down to the very unsolved question of whether or not AI training and regurgitation is copyr…

NYT doesn't care about regurgitation. When it was doable, it was spotty enough that no one would rely on it. But now the "trick" doesn't even work anymore (you would paste the start of an article and chatgpt would continue it).

What they want is to kill training, and more over, prevent the loss of being the middle-man between events and users.

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#93

Post by freejazz »

lingrush4 wrote: post #68

I fully believe that OpenAI is essentially stealing the work of others by training their models on it without permission. However, giving a corporation infamous for promoting authoritarianism full access to millions of private conversations is not the answer. OpenAI is right here. The NYT needs to prove their case another way.

Well the court disagrees with you and found that this is evidence that the NYT needs to prove its case. No surprise, considering its direct evidence of exactly what OpenAI is claiming in its defense...

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#94

Post by freejazz »

AlienRobot wrote: post #87
JCM9 wrote: post #84

This is BS. It’s like saying “We robbed a jewelry store and sold the jewelry. Now the police are poking around to see if anyone is wearing the jewelry we stole. Blasphemy! But don’t worry we will protect your privacy!” Of course the Times wants more evidence that the content OpenAI allegedly stole is ending in things OpenAI is selling.

It's more like a torrent tracker telling users that a newspaper wants to know what people are torrenting because they "claim" people are torrenting the newspaper, but investigating this would be an invasion of privacy of the users of the torrent tracker. This isn't even a hyperbole. It's literally the same thing.

No, it's not. OpenAI is a commercial enterprise selling the stolen data.

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#95

Post by Wistar »

gruez wrote: post #47
Forgeties79 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>your data belongs to you …”as does any culpability for poisoning yourself, suicide, and anything else we clearly enabled but don’t want to be blamed for!” Edit: honestly I’m surprised I left out the bit where they just indiscriminately scraped everything they could online to train these models. The stones to go “your data belongs to you” as they clearly feel entitled to our data is unbelievably absurd

>…”as does any culpability for poisoning yourself, suicide, and anything else we clearly enabled but don’t want to be blamed for!” Should walmart be "culpable" for selling rope that someone hanged themselves with? Should google be "culpable" for returning results about how to commit suicide?

There are current litigation efforts to hold Amazon liable for suicides committed by, in particular, self-poisoning with high-purity sodium nitrite, which, in low concentrations is used as a meat curing agent.

A 2023 lawsuit against Amazon for suicides with sodium nitrite was dismissed but other similar lawsuits continue. The judge held that Amazon, “… had no duty to provide additional warnings, which in this case would not have prevented the deaths, and that Washington law preempted the negligence claims.“

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#96

Post by HelloMcFly »

greyman wrote: post #48
nlh wrote: post #14

Man, maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but it's not often that I read a post that literally makes my skin crawl. This is so transparently icky. "Oh woe is us! We're being sued and we're looking out for YOU the user, who is definitely not the product. We are just a 'lil 'ol (near) trillion-dollar business trying to protect you!" Come ON. Look I don't actually know who's in the right in the OAI vs. NYT dispute, and fran…

Why it is absurd? Conversation between me and ChatGPT can be read by a lawyer working for NYT, and that is what is absurd.

OpenAI has seemingly done everything they can to put publishers in a position to make this demand, and they've certainly not done anything to make it impossible for them to respond to it. Is there a better, more privacy minded way for NYT to get the data they need? Probably, I'm not smart enough to understand all the things that go into such a decision. But I know I don't view them as the villain for asking, and I also know I don't view OpenAI as some sort of guardian of my or my data's best interests.

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#97

Post by Forgeties79 »

gruez wrote: post #73
Forgeties79 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is as unproductive as "guns don't kill people, people do." You're stripping all legitimacy and nuance from the conversation with an overly simplistic response.

>You're stripping all legitimacy and nuance from the conversation with an overly simplistic response. An overly simplistic claim only deserves an overly simplistic response.

What? The claim is true. The nuance is us discussing if it should be true/allowed. You're simplifying the moral discussion and overall just being rude/dismissive.

Comparing rope and an LLM comes across as disingenuous. I struggle to believe that you believe the two are comparable when it comes to the ethics of companies and their impact on society.

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#98

Post by [deleted] »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #81

"The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private ChatGPT conversations." As might any plaintiff. NYT might be the first of many others and the lawsuits may not be limited to copyright claims Why has OpenAI collected and stored 20 million conversations (including "deleted chats") What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations By contrast the purpose of NYT's reques…

[deleted]

Re: Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

#99

Post by rpdillon »

Noaidi wrote: post #77
rpdillon wrote: post #13

I wouldn't want to make it out like I think OpenAI is the good guy here. I don't. But conversations people thought they were having with OpenAI in private are now going to be scoured by the New York Times' lawyers. I'm aware of the third party doctrine and that if you put something online it can never be actually private. But I think this also runs counter to people's expectations when they're using the product. In c…

To show harm they need the proof, this is the point of the lawsuit. They have sufficient evidence that OpenAI was scraping the web and the NY Times. When Altman says "They claim they might find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall." he is blatantly misrepresenting the case. https://smithhopen.com/2025/07/17/nyt-v-openai-microsoft-ai-... "The lawsuit focuses on using copyrighted material fo…

Training has sometimes been held to be fair use under certain circumstances, but in determining fair use, one of the four factors that is considered is how it affects the market for the work being infringed. I would expect that determining to what degree it's regurgitating the New York Times' content is part of that analysis.
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