6 ms·

Here's the thing: the Europeans have a cast iron case. No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of c

Here's the thing: the Europeans have a cast iron case. No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise. This is not to endorse the European position - which is foolish, regressive and short sighted - but only to outline the case overly bureaucratised societies make when established protocols encounters innovation.

hindsightbias 4y ago
Soylent Green is people. At least the original sources there got a good video show and nice drugs.
luckylion 4y ago
> No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise. It's about privacy concerns, not copyright.
- throwntoday 4y ago
  Governments with heavy social programs can't risk losing anymore taxpayers at a time where their systems are already strained by a lack of workers/population decline. This seems like a preemptive measure to prevent that more than a result of privacy concerns.
  - microtonal 4y ago
    Presuming these ulterior motives gets so tiresome. These bans are instated by data protection authorities, which largely operate independently. E.g., the Dutch data protection authority regularly fines the government. Pretty sure that is the case for other EU countries too.
    - throwntoday 4y ago
      You're welcome to disagree with my presumption but you don't appear to be stating anything definitive about this matter either. All these governments have a duty to their aging population, which also tends to make up the majority of the active voter base. Every action they take tends to be multipronged but at the end of the day it's meant to protect those social programs. Consider mass migration to increase labor force and birth rates. Sure they can claim it was purely out of good will, but you'd have to be pretty myopic not to see the reality there.
      - mftrhu 4y ago
        You keep on conflating data protection agencies with governments. They aren't the same thing - the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali is an independent administrative authority - and even the GP pointed that out.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    I assure you, unless it's about multi-billion euro companies, the German state does not care at all whether they'll lose a tax payer or ten or ten thousands (source: me, a tax payer that gets fucked by the bureaucracy at every opportunity). Data Protection is taken extremely seriously and everything that is associated with "big data" is extra suspicious. Throw in "think of the children" for extra spice. I doubt tax income on copyright dividends even registers.
ribosometronome 4y ago
Cast iron case for what?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cguess 4y ago
The main argument is around GDPR which limits/bans the collection and storage of personal information without consent. They definitely did this, and it's quite clear in the law that it's unacceptable (as it should be). OpenAI is the worst of the SV/SF "if we get big enough before we get caught it won't matter" mentality. Unsurprising given who's behind the company.
- CSMastermind 4y ago
  What does collection and storage of personal information mean in this case? The model weights? They're integers. There's no personal information stored in the model. The fact that the model can generate someone's personal information is like saying that a person can type someone's personal information into a Word document so we should ban Office 365.
  - mola 4y ago
    All digital data is just bytes...
basisword 4y ago
>> This is not to endorse the European position - which is foolish, regressive and short sighted Potentially, but I’m glad somebody is taking a minute to question whether or not a handful of tech companies have the right to consume everyone’s information, build their entire business with it and then sell that back to the people whose data they wouldn’t have existed without in the first place.
- hunglee2 4y ago
  yes I agree that the query is not a bad thing. However, what I think is a bad thing is if the query ends up with a ban (which I think it will) and prevents the obvious value of this new class of technology for the rest of humanity
- berkle4455 4y ago
  > have the right to consume everyone’s information, build their entire business with it and then sell that back to the people That’s quite literally what google has done for 25 years, just with advertising for monetization.
  - medvezhenok 4y ago
    Yes, and arguably Google has been way under-regulated for the externalities they caused to the system (one example is having adversarial bidding wars for companies over their own keywords, which is simply a rentier tax on Google advertising) I think we're finally coming around on that (I think a lot of regulators were slow on antitrust in the internet space because the harm to the consumer/environment is not immediately obvious - i.e. it's mostly non-monetary externalities) Same as America as a whole and offshoring to reduce labor cost. The externalities are slow but they're clearly there in the increasing polarization and the growth of the precariat.
  - basisword 4y ago
    It’s not. Indexing and linking to primary sources is very different to consuming all of those primary sources and spitting it back without attribution. Google entered this area a bit with the info boxes they display alongside results but it’s a very different proposition from AI.
ildon 4y ago
At least for what Italy is concerned, the issues raised do not seem to be correlated to the training phase, but rather to the actual usage of chatGPT.
- ildon 4y ago
  Also, based on the combination of the fact that data was made public, article 6, paragraph 1, letter f), and their business, I would argue that their use of personal data scraped on the web for training purposes is legitimate
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise I see the argument. (I'm not sure it's the one Italy made.) Still, it's weird to see GDPR turning into a generic IP bludgeon being cheered on.
microtonal 4y ago
No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise. But these bans are not based on potential copyright violation of content that was used to train the original model. The ban is primarily based on GDPR violations, so privacy. The ban in Italy seems to be based on three point: - A data breach occurring on March 20. - Mass collection of private data for training the model (not sure whether this refers to ChatGPT user queries or the original data, which could contain privacy-sensitive data, also see 'right to forget'). - No age verification. See e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65139406 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65139406
oh_sigh 4y ago
That's not why they banned it though. If chatGPT was offered as a downloadable model which any user could run on their own machine with no internet access, there would be no basis for the ban.
FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
When I read any of your comments, a part of it stays in mind, forever. Does that mean I have to pay you royalties for thinking about it or mentioning it? I don't think so. GPT is like a primitive intelligence that read a large part of the web and got influenced by it, nobody deserves compensation or consultation for the public data it was trained on. If you put something on a public internet page, you should expect that other beings, artificial or not, are going to get influenced by it.
- qgin 4y ago
  It’s not immoral or unethical to digest information, but the difference is when a computer can do that digesting of information the scale is very different than if a human does it and it blows up the incentives for people to create content in the first place. In the most extreme version, no human writing would be read or seen by other humans, it would be all fuel for the machine intelligence. If that it to be our future, we have to figure out how to rearrange incentives so that humans continue to be motivated to create the content that feeds the machine intelligence or the whole system falls apart.
- Out_of_Characte 4y ago
  Does that mean I have to pay you royalties for thinking about it or mentioning it? Yes, if HN were to post copyrighted work that only they could spread, then you would be liable. In the same trend, any patents that HN comments share should not be redistributed/sold by you. Chatgpt circumvents copyright law in a way that is hard to detect. How many sentences of moby dick does it take to prove chatgpt is plagiarising other peoples protected works?
  - nradov 4y ago
    That is mostly not how US copyright or patent law works. Your claim just wrong. It is legal to spread limited amounts of copyrighted material under fair use, and anyone can create and sell new content based on copyrighted material as long as it is sufficiently transformative. It's also totally legal to print out a bunch of patents and redistribute those in a book or whatever (except on certain secret patents which aren't relevant here). You can't copyright a patent filing. The only legal restrictions are on building and selling things that infringe on patent claims.
danielrhodes 4y ago
I am not a lawyer, but this doesn’t seem strong at all. How is it different than a person reading several books on a subject and giving a speech based on what they’ve learned? Obviously if the speech was repeating verbatim what was read, this would not be acceptable. But that is not the case here. Likewise, should the authors of books a child learns to read with be able to claim copyright over all works and language the child produces afterwards simply because their material formed the basis for that child’s neural network related to reading and writing?
- mola 4y ago
  Not a lawyer either, but I think it's different because it's not a person...
calibas 4y ago
> No consent was given by the content creators I assumed consent was hidden deep in some ToS agreement.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
m3kw9 4y ago
Yeah, just forget llm,gpt and the fancy words for a min, you have a company it reads websites data it deems useful and creates a middle layer API to regurgitate/massage all that work back to you and charging you a fee. OpenAI deserves fee but are they forgetting where the training data came from?
fithisux 4y ago
For this they are right.
gumballindie 4y ago
> which is foolish, regressive and short sighted Yet americans constantly complain about china not honouring ip protection laws. Why should a company such as openai be allowed to steal content and then reproduce it without royalties?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thefz 4y ago
> which is foolish, regressive and short sighted Foolish and regressive because we don't want a foreign corporation to raise almost endless profit off of our data? Keep your products in the US then, nothing of value will be lost if we prevent access to Meta, Twitter and all this bullshit.

hindsightbias 4y ago

Soylent Green is people. At least the original sources there got a good video show and nice drugs.

luckylion 4y ago

> No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise. It's about privacy concerns, not copyright.

throwntoday 4y ago
Governments with heavy social programs can't risk losing anymore taxpayers at a time where their systems are already strained by a lack of workers/population decline. This seems like a preemptive measure to prevent that more than a result of privacy concerns.
- microtonal 4y ago
  Presuming these ulterior motives gets so tiresome. These bans are instated by data protection authorities, which largely operate independently. E.g., the Dutch data protection authority regularly fines the government. Pretty sure that is the case for other EU countries too.
  - throwntoday 4y ago
    You're welcome to disagree with my presumption but you don't appear to be stating anything definitive about this matter either. All these governments have a duty to their aging population, which also tends to make up the majority of the active voter base. Every action they take tends to be multipronged but at the end of the day it's meant to protect those social programs. Consider mass migration to increase labor force and birth rates. Sure they can claim it was purely out of good will, but you'd have to be pretty myopic not to see the reality there.
    - mftrhu 4y ago
      You keep on conflating data protection agencies with governments. They aren't the same thing - the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali is an independent administrative authority - and even the GP pointed that out.
- luckylion 4y ago
  I assure you, unless it's about multi-billion euro companies, the German state does not care at all whether they'll lose a tax payer or ten or ten thousands (source: me, a tax payer that gets fucked by the bureaucracy at every opportunity). Data Protection is taken extremely seriously and everything that is associated with "big data" is extra suspicious. Throw in "think of the children" for extra spice. I doubt tax income on copyright dividends even registers.

ribosometronome 4y ago

Cast iron case for what?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

cguess 4y ago

The main argument is around GDPR which limits/bans the collection and storage of personal information without consent. They definitely did this, and it's quite clear in the law that it's unacceptable (as it should be). OpenAI is the worst of the SV/SF "if we get big enough before we get caught it won't matter" mentality. Unsurprising given who's behind the company.

CSMastermind 4y ago
What does collection and storage of personal information mean in this case? The model weights? They're integers. There's no personal information stored in the model. The fact that the model can generate someone's personal information is like saying that a person can type someone's personal information into a Word document so we should ban Office 365.
- mola 4y ago
  All digital data is just bytes...

basisword 4y ago

>> This is not to endorse the European position - which is foolish, regressive and short sighted Potentially, but I’m glad somebody is taking a minute to question whether or not a handful of tech companies have the right to consume everyone’s information, build their entire business with it and then sell that back to the people whose data they wouldn’t have existed without in the first place.

hunglee2 4y ago
yes I agree that the query is not a bad thing. However, what I think is a bad thing is if the query ends up with a ban (which I think it will) and prevents the obvious value of this new class of technology for the rest of humanity
berkle4455 4y ago
> have the right to consume everyone’s information, build their entire business with it and then sell that back to the people That’s quite literally what google has done for 25 years, just with advertising for monetization.
- medvezhenok 4y ago
  Yes, and arguably Google has been way under-regulated for the externalities they caused to the system (one example is having adversarial bidding wars for companies over their own keywords, which is simply a rentier tax on Google advertising) I think we're finally coming around on that (I think a lot of regulators were slow on antitrust in the internet space because the harm to the consumer/environment is not immediately obvious - i.e. it's mostly non-monetary externalities) Same as America as a whole and offshoring to reduce labor cost. The externalities are slow but they're clearly there in the increasing polarization and the growth of the precariat.
- basisword 4y ago
  It’s not. Indexing and linking to primary sources is very different to consuming all of those primary sources and spitting it back without attribution. Google entered this area a bit with the info boxes they display alongside results but it’s a very different proposition from AI.

ildon 4y ago

At least for what Italy is concerned, the issues raised do not seem to be correlated to the training phase, but rather to the actual usage of chatGPT.

ildon 4y ago
Also, based on the combination of the fact that data was made public, article 6, paragraph 1, letter f), and their business, I would argue that their use of personal data scraped on the web for training purposes is legitimate

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise I see the argument. (I'm not sure it's the one Italy made.) Still, it's weird to see GDPR turning into a generic IP bludgeon being cheered on.

microtonal 4y ago

No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise. But these bans are not based on potential copyright violation of content that was used to train the original model. The ban is primarily based on GDPR violations, so privacy. The ban in Italy seems to be based on three point: - A data breach occurring on March 20. - Mass collection of private data for training the model (not sure whether this refers to ChatGPT user queries or the original data, which could contain privacy-sensitive data, also see 'right to forget'). - No age verification. See e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65139406 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65139406

oh_sigh 4y ago

That's not why they banned it though. If chatGPT was offered as a downloadable model which any user could run on their own machine with no internet access, there would be no basis for the ban.

FrenchDevRemote 4y ago

When I read any of your comments, a part of it stays in mind, forever. Does that mean I have to pay you royalties for thinking about it or mentioning it? I don't think so. GPT is like a primitive intelligence that read a large part of the web and got influenced by it, nobody deserves compensation or consultation for the public data it was trained on. If you put something on a public internet page, you should expect that other beings, artificial or not, are going to get influenced by it.

qgin 4y ago
It’s not immoral or unethical to digest information, but the difference is when a computer can do that digesting of information the scale is very different than if a human does it and it blows up the incentives for people to create content in the first place. In the most extreme version, no human writing would be read or seen by other humans, it would be all fuel for the machine intelligence. If that it to be our future, we have to figure out how to rearrange incentives so that humans continue to be motivated to create the content that feeds the machine intelligence or the whole system falls apart.
Out_of_Characte 4y ago
Does that mean I have to pay you royalties for thinking about it or mentioning it? Yes, if HN were to post copyrighted work that only they could spread, then you would be liable. In the same trend, any patents that HN comments share should not be redistributed/sold by you. Chatgpt circumvents copyright law in a way that is hard to detect. How many sentences of moby dick does it take to prove chatgpt is plagiarising other peoples protected works?
- nradov 4y ago
  That is mostly not how US copyright or patent law works. Your claim just wrong. It is legal to spread limited amounts of copyrighted material under fair use, and anyone can create and sell new content based on copyrighted material as long as it is sufficiently transformative. It's also totally legal to print out a bunch of patents and redistribute those in a book or whatever (except on certain secret patents which aren't relevant here). You can't copyright a patent filing. The only legal restrictions are on building and selling things that infringe on patent claims.

danielrhodes 4y ago

I am not a lawyer, but this doesn’t seem strong at all. How is it different than a person reading several books on a subject and giving a speech based on what they’ve learned? Obviously if the speech was repeating verbatim what was read, this would not be acceptable. But that is not the case here. Likewise, should the authors of books a child learns to read with be able to claim copyright over all works and language the child produces afterwards simply because their material formed the basis for that child’s neural network related to reading and writing?

mola 4y ago
Not a lawyer either, but I think it's different because it's not a person...

calibas 4y ago

> No consent was given by the content creators I assumed consent was hidden deep in some ToS agreement.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

m3kw9 4y ago

Yeah, just forget llm,gpt and the fancy words for a min, you have a company it reads websites data it deems useful and creates a middle layer API to regurgitate/massage all that work back to you and charging you a fee. OpenAI deserves fee but are they forgetting where the training data came from?

fithisux 4y ago

For this they are right.

gumballindie 4y ago

> which is foolish, regressive and short sighted Yet americans constantly complain about china not honouring ip protection laws. Why should a company such as openai be allowed to steal content and then reproduce it without royalties?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

thefz 4y ago

> which is foolish, regressive and short sighted Foolish and regressive because we don't want a foreign corporation to raise almost endless profit off of our data? Keep your products in the US then, nothing of value will be lost if we prevent access to Meta, Twitter and all this bullshit.