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I mean, it ingested all of the content from my blog. Without my permission. It's not a major part of their corpus of data, but still -- I wasn't asked and I don
by chasing 3y ago
I mean, it ingested all of the content from my blog. Without my permission. It's not a major part of their corpus of data, but still -- I wasn't asked and I don't really care to donate work to large corporations like that.
So the technology is cool, but I'm firmly of the stance that they cut corners and trampled peoples' rights to get a product out the door. I wouldn't be entirely unhappy if this iteration of these products were sued into the ground and were forced to start over on this stuff The Right Way.
- scarface_74 3y agoYou don’t get to make information publicly available. But not publicly available. If you want your blog to be restricted, put it behind a login
- chasing 3y agoYes I do. I own the work I create, even if it's publicly available. I do get to decide what happens with it.
- 6bb32646d83d 3y agoAnyone can read your blog and then post their own blog post using knowledge they learned while reading yours. ChatGPT "learned" from your blog that same way
- tumult 3y agoComputers aren't people. Software isn't humans.
- mrtranscendence 3y agoSince the way GPT "learns" is not materially similar to how a human learns, I don't see why this talking point is particularly relevant. Nothing stops the courts from distinguishing between an AI and a human with regard to what may be permissible.
- ldhough 3y agoI agree, it seems like all the arguments that the use of data by AI should have no more restrictions than the use of data by humans hinge on the implicit (or sometimes explicit) assumption that human learning and machine learning are identical. While there are parallels, there also seem to be significant differences not only in how the learning is done, but also in outcomes for the person whose data is being used. And since a major purpose of IP, copyright, etc. is at least ostensibly to protect the creators of information from negative outcomes, I don't think the outcomes can be ignored when comparing human learning to ML.
- myself248 3y agoAnthropomorphizing that it "learned" is disingenuous and I expect better from the HN crowd. If ChatGPT regurgitates verbatim or nearly verbatim, something it slurped up from OP's blog, is that not plagiarism? Where do you draw the line? Where would a reasonable person draw the line?
- judge2020 3y agoA human is both capable of reciting things from memory in an infringing manner, and learning from experiences to create something new. Maybe we should tape people's mouth shut if they dare to violate copyright by reciting a copyrighted book word for word or put them in a straight jacket if they recreate a copyrighted painting from memory.
- tucnak 3y agoLike with everything in law, "intent" is paramount. Obviously it's not the trainer's, nor the end-user's goal to reproduce training set data verbatim; quite contrary, overfitting as such is undesirable.
- mrtranscendence 3y agoIntent only goes so far. If I continually but unintentionally reproduce copyrighted works verbatim, I could still face consequences, particularly if I did not show due diligence in preventing it from happening in the first place.
- scarface_74 3y agoBut ChatGPT doesn’t spit out verbatim from the blog.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoActually I fear that people that say this are doing worse than anthropomorphizing. Often rather than claiming human aspects to the machine, they are going further, and claiming machine aspects to the human. Using mechanistic analogies for explaining the human body or mind isn't new, but as machines become better and better at imitating humans, those analogies become more seductive. That's my rant; the danger with 'AI' isn't so much that humans are enslaved by machines, but that we enslave each other -- or dehumanize each other -- with machines.
- blfr 3y agoTo some extent. Others can ingest your work, quote it, talk about it, criticize it, summarize, etc.
- Workaccount2 3y agoThere is a difference between learning from your work and copying your work. You are entitled to control it's distribution and use. You are not entitled to control it's influence and effects.
- tumult 3y agoI think you've made up an irrelevant argument. The work has been incorporated into a commercial product, intentionally, under the control of someone else. Software isn't humans that pay taxes, appear in court, have rights, etc.
- Workaccount2 3y agoNo, the work has not been. The impression that the work leaves on a neural network has been though. AIs are not massive repositories of harvested data. The models are relatively small (<20GB).
- tumult 3y agoA resized, smaller, or encoded version of an image is still subject to copyright. Calling an encoding an 'impression' is deceitful.
- shagie 3y agoNot always. https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/google-thumbnails-are-fair-use-says-court-of-appeals https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/google-thumbnails... > A US court ruled this week that Google's creation and display of thumbnail images does not infringe copyright. It also said that Google was not responsible for the copyright violations of other sites which it frames and links to.
- tumult 3y agoPart of this ruling is about how the images are used -- Fair use -- not just that they were stored in a particular way. If Google was using the smaller versions of the images (thumbnails) in other ways, it could have been infringing. > The Court said that Google did claim fair use, and that whether or not use was fair depended on four factors: the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
- crazygringo 3y ago> I do get to decide what happens with it. No. Both legally and practically, you absolutely do not. The only thing copyright law gives you is an exclusive right to sell it for a limited period of time, as a whole in its original form or similar -- and to transfer that right. Regardless of your desires, anyone can reuse it under the conditions of fair use. They can copy parts of it for parody purposes. If they're not selling anything or taking away from your sales*, they can reproduce it verbatim for private purposes. And even if they are selling something, they can summarize it, quote from it, rephrase it, and so forth. And you don't actually get to decide any of that. * Edit: added "or..."
- meithecatte 3y agoYou are claiming that piracy is legal.
- chasing 3y agoSo you’re saying I’m right except in some narrowly carved-out situations. And I agree with you.
- crazygringo 3y agoNope. You said: > I wasn't asked and I don't really care to donate work to large corporations like that... I do get to decide what happens with it. And I said: > No. Both legally and practically, you absolutely do not. You think you get to decide whether large corporations can train on your work. I'm saying the the law suggests you very much don't get to decide that.
- chasing 3y agoRead the comments you're replying to. I didn't comment on the legality of ChatGPT training on my content, I said I didn't like it. Regardless, the act of posting content publicly does not mean I give up my copyright claim. Yes, there are fair use situations. Training ChatGPT might be one of them, but I'm not seeing lot of concrete information one way or the other and I am seeing arguments that ChatGPT could be considered a derivative work, which would place OpenAI in violation of my copyright. Send some links if you see some definitive case law sorting this stuff out.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoIf I read your blog and used its data along with my own knowledge to create a course, would that be plagiarism or copyright violation?
- sigmoid10 3y agoThat's not how copyright works.
- Levitz 3y ago>You don’t get to make information publicly available. But not publicly available. But we do? Open sourcing something with caveats is common. This code is public BUT not for commercial use. This code is public BUT you must display attribution etc. Sure, blogposts are unlicensed (that I know) but the idea of something publicly available being held to restrictions is nothing new.
- H8crilA 3y agoDo you allow commercial employees to read the code and incorporate knowledge obtained from the code into their brains?
- Levitz 3y agoYes, it's completely unfeasible to make a license to control that. On the other hand, it's completely feasible to make a license that stops someone from training their model with some piece of info, is it not?
- cool_dude85 3y agoShow me where ChatGPT's brain is and your comparison will become relevant.
- H8crilA 3y agoI mean in the floating point / quantized numbers and the connections that make the model? I'm not sure I follow, the analogy to the human brain has always been obvious, it's even in the name (artificial neural network) ...
- mrtranscendence 3y agoThe analogy is just that: an analogy, and a very imperfect, misleading one. The working of the brain may have motivated early research, but GPT (as instantiated in hardware) does not operate or learn in a way similar to a human brain.
- 3y ago
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoAnother day, another person on HN showing us how they don't understand the difference between Public Domain and Open Source or Copyleft etc. And regardless -- the problem now is that expectations of how content can be consumed are now fundamentally violated by automation of content ingestion. People put stuff up on the Internet with the expectation of its consumption by human minds, which have inherent limitations on the speed and scale on which they can learn from and reproduce things, and those humans are also legally liable, socially/ethically obligated, etc. Now we have machines which skirt the limits of legality, and are able to do so on massive scale and without responsibility to society as a whole. Different game now.
- scarface_74 3y ago> People put stuff up on the Internet with the expectation of its consumption by human minds Then people obviously aren’t aware that bots have been indexing web pages and showing summarized information without going to the web page for three decades.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoI think it's a bit intellectually dishonest to claim an equivalence between content indexing for search engines and machine learning for LLMs. They might share an underlying harvesting technique, but their uses -- indexing for information accessibility vs automatic content production are qualitatively different. Further, almost every site has had an e.g. robots.txt which has permitted content harvesting only for certain accepted purposes for a couple decades now. So clearly people already had a sense of how they wanted their content harvested and for what purposes.
- scarface_74 3y agoHow is it not content production when I search for something on Google and get a box with similar questions and summarizes the answer. So you’re okay with Google making money off of your content. But not OpenAI?
- andsoitis 3y agoThat’s the economics of (non-symbolic) AI. To work, it needs humans to create stuff for free. Putting it more bluntly, it is somewhere between a parasite and a slave driver.
- ben_w 3y agoIt doesn't require humans to work for free — while that's been a common default MO since everyone looked at Google making a search index and thinking to themselves "if they're doing it surely do can we", there are data sets made by paying people.
- mrtranscendence 3y agoThere are such datasets, and AI companies absolutely pay to have data curated. But I suspect it would be just unimaginably expensive to create a dataset from scratch with enough tokens to feed a model with hundreds of billions of parameters, all the while paying every participant fairly.
- ben_w 3y ago"fair" is somewhat undefined, as the fair-looking number for being paid for effort can be very different to the fair-looking number for being paid for the resale value of the end product on an open market. I wonder what would an LLM trained on Google code and internal documents look like?
- blueridge 3y agoOne thing I've been thinking about: it's only a matter of time before your friends load an AI assistant on their phone, and it devours every text message you have ever sent to that person, every photo you've shared together, every record of an in-person meeting. This makes me really uncomfortable.
- zapataband1 3y ago* cuts to AT&T in the background hastily dumping texts into ChatGPT *
- dsaavy 3y agoWe're already on the way: https://www.rewind.ai/ https://www.rewind.ai/ Not on the phone yet, but on a Mac which could include iMessages.
- 4ggr0 3y agoThat's what bothers me for years now in the context of contacts on smartphones. Maybe I'm making a mistake when thinking about it, but - if I refuse to share my contacts with let's say Instagram, but all of my friends share their contacts list which includes me, does it really matter if I decline to share or not? Another part which bothers me is that I have lots of different personalities online. On most sites I use different usernames, and I wonder if there will someday be an AI which can match all the different online profile to a single person, even if different username are being used etc.
- ChatGTP 3y agoEvery email you send to a gmail backed account is this.
- taneq 3y agoI wanna do that locally with an LLM, fine tune it on my entire sent email history and have it generate auto-responses to most of my emails. :D
- munchler 3y agoAnyone who reads your blog is "ingesting content" from it. That is presumably the purpose of your blog in the first place. Whether that content is used to train a human mind or an artificial one is probably not up to you as the author.
- anktor 3y agoThis type of comments can be seen every single time a thread about LLM, or OpenAI or some such comes up. And it adds nothing. I'm sorry but saying "Whether that content is used to train a human mind or an artificial one is probably not up to you" may be worse than saying nothing at all. First because it shows enough doubt on whether it's up to the authors of content (IP laws, fair use, intent of the use, and many things I ignore), while giving no laws as an example or frame of reference. And second because it's comparing a human mind that we know exist, to an artificial one, which implies: 1. An LLM is an artificial mind, or close to one, whatever that is (again, not defined). 2. If they were to exist, they would be both equivalent and treated the same as a human one. The amount of jumps in a couple sentences, added to the uncertainty of how copyright would/will work, multiplied by the numer of times I/we read that type of comment every single time, it's getting tiresome. And it's adding noise to the noise-signal ratio.
- 93po 3y agoI disagree, and though the GP maybe didn't have this sentiment, my personal view is that intellectual property is a bunch of crap and just because there are laws around it in our capitalist society doesn't mean that the laws are moral/just/ethical/good. IP is constantly ingested and transformed which is exactly what LLMs are doing. The fact that ChatGPT can't even accurately reproduce data from its training (it gets basic facts/dates/quotes wrong all the time) really reinforces that it's not infringing on anyone's IP. If you're tired of responding to these comments then stop. It's the internet, everyone is at different places in exploring topics and having discussions. Don't poo-poo on someone else's journey and instead move on with your day. There is no required reading (other than TFA) on hacker news.
- munchler 3y ago
- TechBro8615 3y agoYou sent your content to them in response to their HTTP requests. That sure looks like affirmative consent to me.
- chasing 3y agoYou’re right! Just like Disney+ did when I watched Star Wars the other day. I’m excited to know Disney has consented to me posting Star Wars in its entirety free online.
- TechBro8615 3y agoCan you make ChatGPT produce the content of your blog post "in its entirety?" You can share the URL to a ChatGPT conversation, so it should be easy to prove the copyright violation by replying to me with two links: one to your blog post, and one to the ChatGPT conversation containing an unauthorized copy of it.
- archontes 3y agoIf you put your content on a billboard, what expectation should you have that you can control who reads it?
- taneq 3y agoYour blog which you posted online for anyone to download and read? Don't get me wrong, this is a grey area where copyright laws and general consensus haven't caught up with new techonology. But if you voluntarily stick something up online with the intent that anyone can read it, it seems a bit mean to then say "wait no you can't do that" if someone finds a way to materially profit off it.