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Google has no contract with OpenAI though. They used a third party site to scrape conversations. If the outputs themselves are not copyrighted, and they never

Google has no contract with OpenAI though. They used a third party site to scrape conversations. If the outputs themselves are not copyrighted, and they never agreed to the terms of service, it should be fine, right? Albeit unethical and embarrassing.

paxys 4y ago
Hardly unethical, considering OpenAI is doing exactly this.
- vagabund 4y ago
  You can quibble about the ethics of web scraping for ML in general but I think you're conflating issues. OpenAI and Google both scour the web for human-generated content. What Google cares about here is the learnings from OpenAI's proprietary RLHF dataset, for which they had to contract a large sum of human labelers. Finding a roundabout way to extract the value of a direct competitor's purpose-built, costly data feels meaningfully different from scraping the web in general as an input to a transformative use.
  - paxys 4y ago
    > OpenAI and Google both scour the web for human-generated content OpenAI and Google both scour the web for content, period. That content could be human generated or AI generated or a mix of the two. Neither company is respecting copyright or terms of service of every individual bit of data collected. Neither company cares how much effort was put into creating the data, whether humans were paid to do it, or whatever else. So there really isn't that much difference between the two. In fact I can guarantee that there was some Google-generated content within OpenAI's training data.
    - vkou 4y ago
      And herein is the main problem of AI. Its creators consume knowledge from the commons, and give nothing free and unencumbered back. It's like the guy who never brings anything to the potluck, but after everyone finishes eating, he boxes up the leftovers, and starts selling them out of a food cart.
      - justinclift 4y ago
        > after everyone finishes eating, he boxes up the leftovers, and starts selling them out of a food cart. That particular example doesn't seem all that great, as it gives the impression of not letting food go to waste. Though sure, the guy could just give the food away, but shrug.
  - shmel 4y ago
    So what? Is OpenAI RLHF dataset more valuable than millions of books and paintings OpenAI used for free without stopping a second? Why is that? Because one big tech corp paid money for that dataset?
  - abeppu 4y ago
    If there's a party which has intentionally conflated scraping web content in general with scraping it to build a direct competitor to the original sources, that party is Google. Yes, this latest instance with OpenAI outputs is shady, but I think it's in the same spirit as scraping news organizations for content which journalists were paid to write, and then showing portions of it directly in response to queries so people don't go directly to the news organization's pages, and it's in the same spirit as showing answers to query-questions that are excerpts from scraped pages which another organization paid to produce.
  - bloppe 4y ago
    I see no difference. Any web scraping is a means to deflect revenue-generating traffic to yourself, and away from other websites. Fewer people will go to Stack Overflow because of Codex and Copilot. The point that the content was paid for vs volunteered becomes moot once it's posted publicly online for free, on ShareGPT.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > labelers. Finding a roundabout way to extract the value of a direct competitor's purpose-built, costly data feels meaningfully different from scraping the web in general as an input to a transformative use There we go again, its, one law for the unwashed plebs and the other for us. Why do you think that I, after spending my time and effort to write my blog, own my content to a lesser extent that OpenAI does their? Such hypocracy.
- layer8 4y ago
  Two wrongs don’t make a right.
  - asddubs 4y ago
    forgive me if i have limited sympathy when a burglars house gets robbed
    - kbrkbr 4y ago
      This
    - WillPostForFood 4y ago
      It's even less worthy of sympathy - like a counterfeit piece of art being counterfeited. And there isn't even an original, just like a made up counterfeit.
    - layer8 4y ago
      That's not how rights work, though. I'm sure you don't want your rights to be conditional on the sympathy of others.
      - asddubs 4y ago
        good thing I'm just some guy expressing an opinion, and not a judge, then
  - pantalaimon 4y ago
    It’s still debatable if training a computer neutral network on public data is 'wrong' when we very much accept it as a right for biological neural networks.
kweingar 4y ago
> Albeit unethical and embarrassing. I really don’t understand this angle. In fact, I am fairly positive that the training set for GPT-4 contains many thousands of conversations with AI agents not developed by OpenAI. Do AI companies need to manually sift through the corpus and scrub webpages that contain competitor LLM output? (“Yes” is an acceptable answer to this, but then it applies to OpenAI’s currently existing models just as much as to Bard)
- j_maffe 4y ago
  How did you come about being "fairly positive" that GPT-4 is trained on other AI conversations?
  - TremendousJudge 4y ago
    Many AI conversations have been floating around internet forums since the original GPT was released. As OpenAI hasn't shared anything about its training set, to err on the side of caution I would assume that they didn't filter these conversations out. If they aren't even marked as such, it may not even be possible to do. I think it would be very hard to prove that no AI conversations are included in the training set, even if it wasn't secret.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
caconym_ 4y ago
No more unethical or embarrassing than scraping the web for millions of copyrighted works and selling access to unauthorized derivative works.

paxys 4y ago

Hardly unethical, considering OpenAI is doing exactly this.

vagabund 4y ago
You can quibble about the ethics of web scraping for ML in general but I think you're conflating issues. OpenAI and Google both scour the web for human-generated content. What Google cares about here is the learnings from OpenAI's proprietary RLHF dataset, for which they had to contract a large sum of human labelers. Finding a roundabout way to extract the value of a direct competitor's purpose-built, costly data feels meaningfully different from scraping the web in general as an input to a transformative use.
- paxys 4y ago
  > OpenAI and Google both scour the web for human-generated content OpenAI and Google both scour the web for content, period. That content could be human generated or AI generated or a mix of the two. Neither company is respecting copyright or terms of service of every individual bit of data collected. Neither company cares how much effort was put into creating the data, whether humans were paid to do it, or whatever else. So there really isn't that much difference between the two. In fact I can guarantee that there was some Google-generated content within OpenAI's training data.
  - vkou 4y ago
    And herein is the main problem of AI. Its creators consume knowledge from the commons, and give nothing free and unencumbered back. It's like the guy who never brings anything to the potluck, but after everyone finishes eating, he boxes up the leftovers, and starts selling them out of a food cart.
    - justinclift 4y ago
      > after everyone finishes eating, he boxes up the leftovers, and starts selling them out of a food cart. That particular example doesn't seem all that great, as it gives the impression of not letting food go to waste. Though sure, the guy could just give the food away, but shrug.
- shmel 4y ago
  So what? Is OpenAI RLHF dataset more valuable than millions of books and paintings OpenAI used for free without stopping a second? Why is that? Because one big tech corp paid money for that dataset?
- abeppu 4y ago
  If there's a party which has intentionally conflated scraping web content in general with scraping it to build a direct competitor to the original sources, that party is Google. Yes, this latest instance with OpenAI outputs is shady, but I think it's in the same spirit as scraping news organizations for content which journalists were paid to write, and then showing portions of it directly in response to queries so people don't go directly to the news organization's pages, and it's in the same spirit as showing answers to query-questions that are excerpts from scraped pages which another organization paid to produce.
- bloppe 4y ago
  I see no difference. Any web scraping is a means to deflect revenue-generating traffic to yourself, and away from other websites. Fewer people will go to Stack Overflow because of Codex and Copilot. The point that the content was paid for vs volunteered becomes moot once it's posted publicly online for free, on ShareGPT.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > labelers. Finding a roundabout way to extract the value of a direct competitor's purpose-built, costly data feels meaningfully different from scraping the web in general as an input to a transformative use There we go again, its, one law for the unwashed plebs and the other for us. Why do you think that I, after spending my time and effort to write my blog, own my content to a lesser extent that OpenAI does their? Such hypocracy.
layer8 4y ago
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
- asddubs 4y ago
  forgive me if i have limited sympathy when a burglars house gets robbed
  - kbrkbr 4y ago
    This
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    It's even less worthy of sympathy - like a counterfeit piece of art being counterfeited. And there isn't even an original, just like a made up counterfeit.
  - layer8 4y ago
    That's not how rights work, though. I'm sure you don't want your rights to be conditional on the sympathy of others.
    - asddubs 4y ago
      good thing I'm just some guy expressing an opinion, and not a judge, then
- pantalaimon 4y ago
  It’s still debatable if training a computer neutral network on public data is 'wrong' when we very much accept it as a right for biological neural networks.

kweingar 4y ago

> Albeit unethical and embarrassing. I really don’t understand this angle. In fact, I am fairly positive that the training set for GPT-4 contains many thousands of conversations with AI agents not developed by OpenAI. Do AI companies need to manually sift through the corpus and scrub webpages that contain competitor LLM output? (“Yes” is an acceptable answer to this, but then it applies to OpenAI’s currently existing models just as much as to Bard)

j_maffe 4y ago
How did you come about being "fairly positive" that GPT-4 is trained on other AI conversations?
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  Many AI conversations have been floating around internet forums since the original GPT was released. As OpenAI hasn't shared anything about its training set, to err on the side of caution I would assume that they didn't filter these conversations out. If they aren't even marked as such, it may not even be possible to do. I think it would be very hard to prove that no AI conversations are included in the training set, even if it wasn't secret.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

caconym_ 4y ago

No more unethical or embarrassing than scraping the web for millions of copyrighted works and selling access to unauthorized derivative works.