25 ms·

New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

134 points by 8ig8 3y ago

8ig8 3y ago
Interesting point… > A top concern for The Times is that ChatGPT is, in a sense, becoming a direct competitor with the paper by creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper's staff.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  It’s sort of ironic though since the Times is “news” where as GPT is built on historic texts. Of course that gap will tighten until we have near real-time models. But that’s not the reality today.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    The Times is not merely news, it is the paper of record for the united states (meaning its historical articles are indexed and commonly used to establish prior facts).
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      It's not like that's an official designation or anything. It's just something people say. If you're looking to prove a prior fact in a court case, you're perfectly allowed to cite the Washington Post or the Boston Globe or anything else that has a good reputation. There are lots of "papers of record" in the US -- you're not limited to one per country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record#By_reputation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record#By_reputat...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - prepend 3y ago
    I think it’s ironic because news organizations observe the world and then synthesize it into reporting. Imagine if someone doing a thing sued NYT for watching them do it, linking it to other issues and producing a new article. News itself is a derived content that’s dependent on other people doing things.
brrrrrm 3y ago
What’s going to be the name used for the laws that attempt to tackle machine paraphrasing?
- jondwillis 3y ago
  "Protecting Against Rephrasing: Respecting Original Texts Act" or the "P.A.R.R.O.T Act" or "Battling Unlawful Language: Limit Scraping and Harness Initial Texts Act" or the "B.U.L.L.S.H.I.T Act".
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    This is good. Have you considered working for NASA or a major government defense contractor?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Copyright law. Which already covers both mechanical duplication, including mechnaical duplication with automatic alterations to evade detection while continuing to reproduce protect elements if the original.
  - thrwayaistartup 3y ago
    > including mechnaical duplication with automatic alterations to evade detection while continuing to reproduce protect elements if the original. That's super interesting and is news to me. Thanks for sharing. Would you mind linking to relevant statutes or court decisions? (This isn't a "citation needed" post -- I believe you, and I'm genuinely curious to read more, but can't find anything!)
- twoodfin 3y ago
  Paraphrasing is not the issue. The issue is that OpenAI copied the Times’ creative works into a GPU to train a model. That copy was likely neither licensed nor fair use.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
If a human reads something, it goes into their brain, and it becomes an influence on future works they produce. This doesn't mean that 'copywrite' extends into my brain. A company can't copywrite what I'm thinking about. And what if I do try to paraphrase something from memory, from a few sources, and happen to spit out a very similar sentence from memory. Am I breaking the law? To go further. Since all knowledge is pretty much fed into a human from hundreds of books, movies, TV, internet, all pumped into a human from birth. Then everything in the brain is a product of something with a copywrite. So anything produced is some amalgamation of copywrites. Why not use similar argument for AI. It is clear when asking it to do something like "write a screen play for Othello using dialog like Tarantino, but with bit of style like Baz Luhrmann". That what it produces is 'as unique as a human' would be, or just as filled with things that have copywrites.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  > Am I breaking the law? The intent of [US] copyright law is to promote new works of art (which can be derivative). So copyright did exactly what it is supposed to do in your analogy. Plus, you're human, which gives you special rights that software doesn't posses.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    But. I am allowed to at least read the copywritten material, from which it goes into my brain to become mixed up with everything else, and spit out to produce something 'new' or 'newish'. Some of these lawsuits are trying to prevent the AI from even 'reading' the material. It can't even be used as an influence. Wouldn't it be better to treat the products of the AI with the same laws as humans. If the new 'product' is 'too close' to something existing, then they get sued. Just like a musician that has a song with a few notes that sound a little too close to someone's song from 30 years ago gets sued. The songwriter was allowed to listen to the music, it went into their brain and became an influence. If that influence becomes too great, then it can be sued.
    - lokar 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bubblethink 3y ago
>If, when someone searches online, they are served a paragraph-long answer from an AI tool that refashions reporting from The Times, the need to visit the publisher's website is greatly diminished, said one person involved in the talks. If, when someone reads a newspaper, they are served a paragraph-long answer from an NYTimes reporter that refashions reporting from local sources, the need to interact with the local sources is greatly diminished.
- belltaco 3y ago
  So? The local source is free to sue the NYT for copyright infringement if they so wish.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    This certainly happens in the UK with different newspapers, and starting with a letter demanding payment, but the same idea. Very few people bother doing this for much the same reason very few bother fighting any of the other terrible decisions made by corporations with legal departments whose annual cost exceeds their personal lifetime earnings.
- Legend2440 3y ago
  Not to mention there are already entire news outlets that exist to summarize paywalled journalism. Ever read an article that starts with "The NYTimes reports..."?
rurp 3y ago
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that LLMs might lead to the end of the open web, or at least a drastically reduced version of it. So much of these model's utility is in directly competing with the producers of the training data. Content creators and aggregators are seeing more and more reason to restrict and limit access, to avoid having AI companies consume all of their data and then be the ones making money from it going forward. I fear that LLMs are going to cause the internet to be a much worse and less open space.
- buildbot 3y ago
  No it's the death of the corporate content hosting web - the open web was never about making money with your blog post/irc chat/usenet group/etc content, at least in my opinion. Let data be free! If someone wants to use it to make money, well, it's open, just like open source. It's still not okay to take open source work and claim it as your own, which is what copyright should be limited to. Stealing a photo or plagiarizing an essay is intrinsically different than just having a copy read by something, be it human or an mechanical process such as training a LLM.
  - sundaeofshock 3y ago
    Maybe I don’t want my non-corporate art to be a part of some large corporation’s training data.
    - k_vi 3y ago
      User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: /
      - jamilton 3y ago
        That was my gut reaction too, but presumably unless it becomes regulated, at least some competitors to OpenAI won't respect any robots.txt and thus any open content might be training data.
      - prmoustache 3y ago
bubblethink 3y ago
I think all OpenAI needs to do is scan physical newspapers and OCR them. No ToS to agree to, and no ToS on print editions.
- test098 3y ago
  ignorance of copyright law won't save you here. i can't legally torrent a copywrited music file just because "no tos to agree to" when i listen to it.
  - bubblethink 3y ago
    There is no copyright involved in training a model. No precedent at least. Only online ToS/API restrictions exist for scraping content. The DMCA issues exist entirely on the (re)distribution side of coyright material. So seeding in a torrent swarm = redistribution. If you download some copyright material somehow and don't share it with anyone, there is no caselaw that says anything about it.
    - test098 3y ago
      the NYT certainly seems to think there's a copyright issue - namely, their copyrighted work being directly used to create a potential competitor. > If you download some copyright material somehow and don't share it with anyone, there is no caselaw that says anything about it. this is still a violation of the law. you cannot download copyrighted material against the terms of the copyright holder (like downloading a movie or album).
    - bandrami 3y ago
      RIAA kept running into this problem which is why it only sent the lawyers after people they could confirm seeded.
jiscariot 3y ago
My concern isn't copyright law, but that if trained on the NYT, these llms are going to be favorable to starting conflicts in the middle-east. https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its-iraq-war-shame/ https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...
akolbe 3y ago
There is a very real risk that we end up with an inferior product cannibalizing a superior one and driving it out of business. Moreover, AI would seem to be even more susceptible to capture and manipulation than conventional media. When it's a question of guiding thought I prefer the humanities to tech. (Same with art.)
- awesomeMilou 3y ago
  > we end up with an inferior product cannibalizing a superior one and driving it out of business. In case that print is meant by inferior product: The same argument could've been brought up for Napster, where traditional distribution via CD printing through music labels are the inferior product driving the superior one out of business. Or rather it's big labels suing Napster out of business. I also hold a dislike for the copyright lobby, but this matter is serious. The question of whether the training of LLM's with copyrighted data is a legitimate one, as OpenAI did not just use contributions from large media outlets like NYT but capitalized on small contributions from individual contributors. A ruling in favor of copyright would force OpenAI to shut down - but given their impressive demo of the tech, I hope we'd see more open and accessible versions of these models emerge. As impressive as ChatGPT is, I dislike having my access to information governed by some large corporate entity. I also dislike a company directly capitalizing on my contributions without my explicit consent.
  - aa1234556 3y ago
    [dead]
  - traveler01 3y ago
    For me the question is highly debatable. As far as I'm aware the training of AI works by crawling various content from the Internet, so they're using a product, which are NY articles to train an AI, meaning they're using their content to help creating a product. But in this sense, shouldn't they be suing Google as well? Since Google as a search engine, also crawls the web and shows their articles in their search results, usually it may even use them for those quick answers features. My 5 cents on this are that NY Times noticed OpenAI has deep pockets, they may have ground to sue and decides to try their look in order to get some quick easy money. Now, I don't know if what OpenAI is doing with ChatGPT does not fall under fair use.
voytec 3y ago
> if a federal judge finds that OpenAI illegally copied The Times' articles to train its AI model, the court could order the company to destroy ChatGPT's dataset, forcing the company to recreate it using only work that it is authorized to use. I'd like to see it happening but it sounds unrealistic.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  I think it's the most natural way it would happen. Pit powerful interests (publishers) against powerful interests (Microsoft/ClosedAI). The only surprising thing is it's taking publishers so long to notice this fresh abuse of copyright at grand scale will cost them.
  - gmerc 3y ago
    Which is why OpenAIs GTM strategy involves the biggest players in each industry. That said, the outcome is unlikely - we have trained AI for more than a decade as ‘fair use’ at this point, it’s the application of the technology that is shifting the perspective, nor the act of training. Every computer vision system in the world is trained on mostly public data for example. Furthermore, the LLMs purpose is not to generate news so NYT will have to argue about the value of archive data. Many jurisdictions have thresholds of how much of an original work contributes to the derivative before it would be considered not fair use or plagiarism. Given the size of the datasets - good luck.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      > we have trained AI for more than a decade as ‘fair use’ at this point Fair use is about use. Spellchecking ML, search engine ML, etc. all different than ML that produces content.
- aero-glide2 3y ago
  If I read 1000s of of NYT articles to improve my writing skills, add then write an article of my own, is that a copyright violation?
baby-yoda 3y ago
These mega LLMs that can autonomously roam the web and consume original content are basically the "I made this" meme[0] and having some legal precedent would be good for all users of the web. [0] - https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-made-this https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-made-this
- petesergeant 3y ago
  > having some legal precedent would be good for all users of the web Honestly that's true whichever way it falls. The sooner it's clear what's allowed and what's not, the better for everyone.
aero-glide2 3y ago
Copyrights and patents are holding back humanity.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  Somebody posted this link in a comment on a thread the other day: https://news.artnet.com/market/koch-brother-loses-it-on-air-after-blowing-millions-on-bogus-wine-41162 https://news.artnet.com/market/koch-brother-loses-it-on-air-... And it occurred to me that this is precisely the thing that's holding back humanity: "Koch estimates that he has spent $25 million on legal fees—far more than the $5 million he originally spent on the fake wine itself." We have a legal system that is completely inaccessible to the average man. That it can generate $25M in civil legal fees is beyond absurd. Patents and copyrights derive much of their force from the fact that they are enforced by a legal process where to play is to lose. There's no winning. It's no longer about justice, and it has largely become a form of financial bullying where entrenched interests beat up on smaller ones. Fix the legal system -- make it accessible -- and you've fixed patents and copyrights. To address this thread's point: I believe that AI, and perhaps _only_ AI, might be able to help with this.
  - emporas 3y ago
    Two friends of mine, created a pretty good song some time back in 2013, and they tried to copyright it. One lawyer and mutual friend of mine and the band, asked for 200 euros to copyright just that one song. Later they realized, they could copyright the song for just 30 euros. On some other totally unrelated news, my parents knew a person who sold en mass music on cassettes illegally copied from other cassettes back in the 80s. He bought a BMW and build a house just from that. I was friends with his grandson when we were teenagers, and his grandson didn't care to play basketball or football or anything like that. He was obsessed with listening to music and memorize all the lyrics and stuff.
    - layer8 3y ago
      You don’t have to “copyright” a creative work in Europe for it to enjoy copyright protection. It automatically does so by virtue of being a creative work.
machdiamonds 3y ago
Don't humans operate similarly? We gain knowledge through experiences. These AI models effectively condense a vast amount of experience data into weights. Considering the global race in AI advancements, I'm skeptical about the success of these copyright claims. I do find it hypocritical that OpenAI says that other LLMs can't be trained on data generated by their LLMs.
- villgax 3y ago
  True
- LatteLazy 3y ago
  Not just humans in general, the NYT specifically relies on the fact news cannot be copyrighted. Then claims it's articles are sacred...
  - dspillett 3y ago
    IIRC the distinction is that facts can't be copyrighted, a particular arrangement of facts can, particularly if something more subjective (analysis or opinion) is included. So I can write my own article about the sky being shown to appear blue much of the time, but I can't copy someone else's article about the same subject.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      How would one even go about a phonebook-style mechanical listing of facts and occurrences? You’re listing an impossibility and then saying that garden-variety connective sentences somehow make it not a factual listing. Like yes if you copy a NYT article verbatim it’s like copying a phone book ads and all, and that’s infringement. But that’s not what a LLM does, NYT doesn’t like their content being used and summarized at all, even in a rearranged form that merely relies on the factual information included in the article. That’s what they want to get paid for, and unfortunately that’s not copyrightable and OpenAI is correct they don’t have to pay for that. NYT disagrees but again, they are kinda attempting to claim copyright on the factual information because they wrote some connective sentences between.
gmerc 3y ago
Social media, especially Facebook and Google News devalued news by commoditizing it. News is trying to avoid the next generation of tech doing that to the long tail of data.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pimterry 3y ago
Honestly, I think generative AI losing a massive copyright showdown is inevitable at this stage. It's extremely easy to get the latest generation of AIs to produce outputs that in many fields sans-AI would be trivially considered as IP infringement. While there are many interesting reasonable legal & technical arguments that it's not, the result completely undermines copyright protections regardless. If that's accepted at scale, copyright in practice will change completely. In effect, the choices are "block this, or entirely destroy copyright protections in many industries". You can't allow this without eventually allowing everybody to simulate their own NY Times reporters, produce their own Marvel movies, and create their own Taylor Swift albums. If you do allow that, the many many affected industries have catastrophic problems. Problematic though copyright laws are, I see no world where all those protections go away any time soon, and so if the courts don't agree to protect copyright already in this scenario, then it will eventually be legislated to make that happen. AI consuming copyrighted data and producing an output has to be considered a derivative work (or indeed, the model itself will be considered a derivative work) or IP protections are effectively broken. There's a grace period now while we work our way there, but the politics is pretty clear and with no plausible path to "let's drop copyright completely" ASAP, I just don't see any other result in the medium term. Doesn't mean the end of generative AI by any means, just a slowdown as we move to a world where you need to negotiate rights and buy data to feed it first, instead of scraping everybody else's for free.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  Or on the converse: if those industries are unviable without copyright protection, they could go away entirely. This is a plausible path to "drop copyright entirely", just like encryption was dropped as an export-controlled technology in the late 90s. (remember the 40-bit "international" SSL?) OpenAI etc. have huge amounts of money behind them, they very well have a fighting chance in court to defend their usage of scraping the internet.
  - pimterry 3y ago
    > if those industries are unviable without copyright protection, they could go away entirely. These creative industries include all of software development, music, TV, movies, books, media, art, etc. You do technically solve the problem of copyright by shutting all those down, but I'm not sure it's a solution anybody will vote for. If you can come up with a serious alternative though, which can sustain those creative industries without requiring copyright, now is probably the best moment in all of history to seize the day and make that happen. There's going to be a big shake-up regardless, it's the perfect chance for alternative models. Bear in mind that dropping copyright entirely doesn't just hurt Disney and Sony Music though - with no copyright the GPL and all other open-source licenses are unenforceable, anybody can copy & sell anybody else's art or design without permission, Spotify doesn't have to pay musicians even $0.01 any more, etc etc etc. It's not an easy problem.
villgax 3y ago
Sue these hypocritical fair-use citers who prevent people from training on their own outputs. Force them to reveal their entire training set for generating oblong statments
pierrefermat1 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFKV48ikV5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFKV48ikV5E Relevant to the article: Large Language Models Meet Copyright Law at Simons
PeterisP 3y ago
I think that the proper outcome for all of this would be acknowledgement that the current copyright laws very poorly regulate this aspect, that the key parts of any such legal action are at the not-really-described edges of law because these edges weren't relevant until now; and so instead of waiting for courts ruling on how law-as-written-now applies and accepting these rulings, we will likely get some new legislation explicitly setting what the legal norms should be. In the short term, of course, the existing law matters, but the main discussion should be not on how to apply existing law but how to ensure that the new laws match what we-the-people would want.
- theragra 3y ago
  100% this. But I doubt it will happen in the US, unfortunately.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    The tech industry has sufficient money and influence for lobbying to push this one through. The media industry did the DMCA adjustments to copyright reasonably fast, and tech industry is even more powerful and wealthy.
    - sebzim4500 3y ago
      Yeah but in this case there are extremely influential forces on both sides of the issue. I think when this happens it is normally easier to block a law than to push it through, so I expect the current laws will remain for the short/medium term.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
If writing a few paragraphs around something someone else said is copyrightable to you then isn’t GPT writing a few paragraphs around your work copyrightable to OpenAI too…
ojosilva 3y ago
IANAL, but copyright protections are pretty much tied to content and format and not to the idea itself, with the intent of preventing (or putting a price on) the copying of original works. The Times will have a very hard time proving that their content is being re-marketed by OpenAI. Having a competing product based on your ideas. Compare: "Steve Jobs [was] a tyrant": https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/steve-jobs-defended-his-work-with-a-barbed-tongue.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/steve-jobs-def... Against: "Whether to describe SJ as a tyrant is a matter of perspective...": https://chat.openai.com/share/28633f0c-007f-48b6-a615-1581c3ef3041 https://chat.openai.com/share/28633f0c-007f-48b6-a615-1581c3... The general way LLMs work do not preserve content in it's original form: the ideas they contain are extracted and clustered statistically - as a ELI5 refresher, an LLM reads 2 million NY Times articles and records that after the word "Steve" there are a lot of "Jobs" followed by a lot of "was a genius/tyrant", "founded Apple", etc. Then LLMs recreate the user question "Who was Steve Jobs?" using this complex net of token/word stats. Is that fair use? I think OpenAI lawyers will not even tap the fair use question, they will simply state that no copy happened, just a statistical collection of words from various sources. And importantly: no LLM source is really prevalent, so the end result cannot be even be traced back to the source, especially if multiple, similar news sources are being fed to training. I have no idea how the Times is going to prove that its _theirs_ news.
- simion314 3y ago
  >The general way LLMs work do not preserve content in it's original form: the ideas they contain are extracted and clustered statistically - as a Is the way LLM work relevant? I can make a shitty script that has as input Microsoft proprietary code and as output something identical in purpose but the text is completely different, I would rename names with synonyms, swap some things around etc. I am not against AIs, my opinion is that if your AI uses GPL code the output should be GPL, if it uses public domain images the output should be public domain images. I mean for code if AI is actual intelligent you should be able to train an AI with C with just a few books and not with the entire GitHub open source code (and notice MS did not trained copilot on the proprietary code they have access proving they are not confident that they are in the right).
olgeni 3y ago
They own copyright on hallucinating weapons of mass destruction? :D
boobalyboo 3y ago
[flagged]
- konschubert 3y ago
  That’s not how copyright works.
  - boobalyboo 3y ago
    [dead]
oefrha 3y ago
Hopefully soon enough (within a decade?) we’ll all be able to run large language models on cheap consumer devices, and model weights containing everything including NYT will be floating around in the form of warez readily consumed by anyone with a modicum of savvy, whether NYT likes them or not. They can’t stop progress.
t_luke 3y ago
The precedent people should be paying much more attention to is sampling in music. When it first arose, it really wasn’t clear what status it had. There was at least a decade when people basically thought it was legal to use small samples of other recordings because they were small and the new use turned them into something unrecognisably different. Which was kind of logical, actually, but turned out not to be true! The current legal requirement to get clearance for all samples only arose after a bunch of court cases in the late 80s/ early 90s, mostly involving quite obscure musicians. There are a lot of people on here who assume that ‘logic will prevail’ in the courts on questions like use of copyrighted data in training data. History shows that this really isn’t a safe assumption. The courts have historically been extremely favorable to copyright holders. It would be foolish to underestimate the legal risk to openai et al here
honeybadger1 3y ago
A skirmish to not use our collective acquired knowledge and hide it behind selfish...capitalist gain.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
“In the end lawyers saved humanity from an all powerful AI.”
vldchk 3y ago
While (in general) I agree with arguments against “copywriting hell”, in particular this case it is not about copywriting itself, but about the consequences of GenAI to entire industry. Journalists exist not without a reason, yes they work with facts and very often — open facts, but they still assemble those facts in certain way to construct a narrative, connect dots and tell us some story (not counting cases when journalist works with their sources and produce a unique inside information). Then OpenAI comes, says “thank you very much” and assemble all of journalists work into one Uber Knowledgeable Journalist who can answer all of your questions. So far so good, we create a public good service, and copywriters are in shambles. Until you start making money on it. That’s where the problem. If OpenAI would be a non profit organization like Wiki Foundation, who just wants to make internet as better place — not much arguments you can find to support NYT lawsuit. But monetization changes everything. Basically NYT is not worried about re using its text as itself, it is worried that no one will want to visit NYT no more and will pay Microsoft/Google and get all answers from them. Let’s put an example. There were a famous story when FT journalist discover a massive fraud in Wirecard accounting and essentially lead to a death of this organization. That articles were a result of multi-year reporting work when journalist piece by piece and step by step collect facts, meet people, and eventually spot the gap. Now, in age of Bard/Bing/ChatGPT, you don’t need to read original article to know all of this. You can ask search engine or Chatbot and get essential re phrasing of an original reporter work. You don’t need no more to go to FT, pay them for paywall, watch their ads, etc. Effectively FT make a huge investment into their people to allow them spend 2 years on this issue and report it and now have a 0 leads to their website because all of them are eaten by Google and Microsoft who will sell you their ads and retain you in their monetized products. Imagine that you built a for-profit paid library for some task. You make a code available through paywall and ask people to pay you to get to it and solve their problems. Then Microsoft comes, sneak beyond paywall, scrap your code and publish it recompiled and slightly optimized version in open access, so no one longer ever need to go on your website but ask Microsoft to show them your code. Would you be happy? All of this cases for me make this case not such easy and straightforward as it seems to be “bad copywriters against progress of humanity”. At the end of the day, if NYT/FT/New Yorker and others will stop publishing their work and fire all journalists, will ChatGPT tell us same depth level stories as we read there?
zb3 3y ago
It's time to abolish copyright.
toss1 3y ago
>>A top concern for The Times is that ChatGPT is, in a sense, becoming a direct competitor with the paper by creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper's staff. This seems to me to be completely standard in the newspaper industry. Many times every week, I see stories in the form "The [Major_News_Outlet] reports that [Event_X occurred] or [their investigation revealed Y] and here are the details [...]. Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. If you write a history of Issac Newton or the invention of semiconductors, I cannot copy that wholesale and sell it as mine, but nothing prevents me writing my own version, even using the same facts and citing your work. I'm quite sure that I could provide a service where a bunch of workers read NYT articles and write brief summaries. I'm not sure they would even need citations, as long as we don't copy chunks wholesale. If OpenAI is simply parroting the words of the NYT articles without Fair Use constraints (short blurbs), it seems they have a problem. If they are fully re-writing them into short non-copying summaries, it seems the NYT has a problem. It'll be interesting to see how the courts sort this out.
robbywashere_ 3y ago
incoming backroom payment deals with publishers. "OpenAI now features training data from our partners X, Y, and Z"
mediumsmart 3y ago
I think anybody should have the right to protect the word combinations they own by not publishing them on the internet.
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  Copyright law doesn’t stop applying because your website is accessible over the internet. I think generative AI is cool but training an AI to do the thing you do using your words is pretty clearly not allowed under current copyright law, and not only that but it makes people who use AI look like bad people who are fine stealing other people’s work for their own enjoyment.
exabrial 3y ago
Good. Literally anyone’s copyrighted comments on the internet should get a settlement
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
"I'll keep saying it every time this comes up. I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted writing verbatim." Personally I think they argue that way because they get off on being contrarian out of spite, but to me it's just a signal of maliciousness and stupidity all at once.

134 points by 8ig8 3y ago

8ig8 3y ago

Interesting point… > A top concern for The Times is that ChatGPT is, in a sense, becoming a direct competitor with the paper by creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper's staff.

nemo44x 3y ago
It’s sort of ironic though since the Times is “news” where as GPT is built on historic texts. Of course that gap will tighten until we have near real-time models. But that’s not the reality today.
- dekhn 3y ago
  The Times is not merely news, it is the paper of record for the united states (meaning its historical articles are indexed and commonly used to establish prior facts).
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    It's not like that's an official designation or anything. It's just something people say. If you're looking to prove a prior fact in a court case, you're perfectly allowed to cite the Washington Post or the Boston Globe or anything else that has a good reputation. There are lots of "papers of record" in the US -- you're not limited to one per country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record#By_reputation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record#By_reputat...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- prepend 3y ago
  I think it’s ironic because news organizations observe the world and then synthesize it into reporting. Imagine if someone doing a thing sued NYT for watching them do it, linking it to other issues and producing a new article. News itself is a derived content that’s dependent on other people doing things.

brrrrrm 3y ago

What’s going to be the name used for the laws that attempt to tackle machine paraphrasing?

jondwillis 3y ago
"Protecting Against Rephrasing: Respecting Original Texts Act" or the "P.A.R.R.O.T Act" or "Battling Unlawful Language: Limit Scraping and Harness Initial Texts Act" or the "B.U.L.L.S.H.I.T Act".
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  This is good. Have you considered working for NASA or a major government defense contractor?
dragonwriter 3y ago
Copyright law. Which already covers both mechanical duplication, including mechnaical duplication with automatic alterations to evade detection while continuing to reproduce protect elements if the original.
- thrwayaistartup 3y ago
  > including mechnaical duplication with automatic alterations to evade detection while continuing to reproduce protect elements if the original. That's super interesting and is news to me. Thanks for sharing. Would you mind linking to relevant statutes or court decisions? (This isn't a "citation needed" post -- I believe you, and I'm genuinely curious to read more, but can't find anything!)
twoodfin 3y ago
Paraphrasing is not the issue. The issue is that OpenAI copied the Times’ creative works into a GPU to train a model. That copy was likely neither licensed nor fair use.
- dragonwriter 3y ago

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

If a human reads something, it goes into their brain, and it becomes an influence on future works they produce. This doesn't mean that 'copywrite' extends into my brain. A company can't copywrite what I'm thinking about. And what if I do try to paraphrase something from memory, from a few sources, and happen to spit out a very similar sentence from memory. Am I breaking the law? To go further. Since all knowledge is pretty much fed into a human from hundreds of books, movies, TV, internet, all pumped into a human from birth. Then everything in the brain is a product of something with a copywrite. So anything produced is some amalgamation of copywrites. Why not use similar argument for AI. It is clear when asking it to do something like "write a screen play for Othello using dialog like Tarantino, but with bit of style like Baz Luhrmann". That what it produces is 'as unique as a human' would be, or just as filled with things that have copywrites.

nullindividual 3y ago
> Am I breaking the law? The intent of [US] copyright law is to promote new works of art (which can be derivative). So copyright did exactly what it is supposed to do in your analogy. Plus, you're human, which gives you special rights that software doesn't posses.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  But. I am allowed to at least read the copywritten material, from which it goes into my brain to become mixed up with everything else, and spit out to produce something 'new' or 'newish'. Some of these lawsuits are trying to prevent the AI from even 'reading' the material. It can't even be used as an influence. Wouldn't it be better to treat the products of the AI with the same laws as humans. If the new 'product' is 'too close' to something existing, then they get sued. Just like a musician that has a song with a few notes that sound a little too close to someone's song from 30 years ago gets sued. The songwriter was allowed to listen to the music, it went into their brain and became an influence. If that influence becomes too great, then it can be sued.
  - lokar 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bubblethink 3y ago

>If, when someone searches online, they are served a paragraph-long answer from an AI tool that refashions reporting from The Times, the need to visit the publisher's website is greatly diminished, said one person involved in the talks. If, when someone reads a newspaper, they are served a paragraph-long answer from an NYTimes reporter that refashions reporting from local sources, the need to interact with the local sources is greatly diminished.

belltaco 3y ago
So? The local source is free to sue the NYT for copyright infringement if they so wish.
- ben_w 3y ago
  This certainly happens in the UK with different newspapers, and starting with a letter demanding payment, but the same idea. Very few people bother doing this for much the same reason very few bother fighting any of the other terrible decisions made by corporations with legal departments whose annual cost exceeds their personal lifetime earnings.
Legend2440 3y ago
Not to mention there are already entire news outlets that exist to summarize paywalled journalism. Ever read an article that starts with "The NYTimes reports..."?

rurp 3y ago

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that LLMs might lead to the end of the open web, or at least a drastically reduced version of it. So much of these model's utility is in directly competing with the producers of the training data. Content creators and aggregators are seeing more and more reason to restrict and limit access, to avoid having AI companies consume all of their data and then be the ones making money from it going forward. I fear that LLMs are going to cause the internet to be a much worse and less open space.

buildbot 3y ago
No it's the death of the corporate content hosting web - the open web was never about making money with your blog post/irc chat/usenet group/etc content, at least in my opinion. Let data be free! If someone wants to use it to make money, well, it's open, just like open source. It's still not okay to take open source work and claim it as your own, which is what copyright should be limited to. Stealing a photo or plagiarizing an essay is intrinsically different than just having a copy read by something, be it human or an mechanical process such as training a LLM.
- sundaeofshock 3y ago
  Maybe I don’t want my non-corporate art to be a part of some large corporation’s training data.
  - k_vi 3y ago
    User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: /
    - jamilton 3y ago
      That was my gut reaction too, but presumably unless it becomes regulated, at least some competitors to OpenAI won't respect any robots.txt and thus any open content might be training data.
    - prmoustache 3y ago

bubblethink 3y ago

I think all OpenAI needs to do is scan physical newspapers and OCR them. No ToS to agree to, and no ToS on print editions.

test098 3y ago
ignorance of copyright law won't save you here. i can't legally torrent a copywrited music file just because "no tos to agree to" when i listen to it.
- bubblethink 3y ago
  There is no copyright involved in training a model. No precedent at least. Only online ToS/API restrictions exist for scraping content. The DMCA issues exist entirely on the (re)distribution side of coyright material. So seeding in a torrent swarm = redistribution. If you download some copyright material somehow and don't share it with anyone, there is no caselaw that says anything about it.
  - test098 3y ago
    the NYT certainly seems to think there's a copyright issue - namely, their copyrighted work being directly used to create a potential competitor. > If you download some copyright material somehow and don't share it with anyone, there is no caselaw that says anything about it. this is still a violation of the law. you cannot download copyrighted material against the terms of the copyright holder (like downloading a movie or album).
  - bandrami 3y ago
    RIAA kept running into this problem which is why it only sent the lawyers after people they could confirm seeded.

jiscariot 3y ago

My concern isn't copyright law, but that if trained on the NYT, these llms are going to be favorable to starting conflicts in the middle-east. https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its-iraq-war-shame/ https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...

akolbe 3y ago

There is a very real risk that we end up with an inferior product cannibalizing a superior one and driving it out of business. Moreover, AI would seem to be even more susceptible to capture and manipulation than conventional media. When it's a question of guiding thought I prefer the humanities to tech. (Same with art.)

awesomeMilou 3y ago
> we end up with an inferior product cannibalizing a superior one and driving it out of business. In case that print is meant by inferior product: The same argument could've been brought up for Napster, where traditional distribution via CD printing through music labels are the inferior product driving the superior one out of business. Or rather it's big labels suing Napster out of business. I also hold a dislike for the copyright lobby, but this matter is serious. The question of whether the training of LLM's with copyrighted data is a legitimate one, as OpenAI did not just use contributions from large media outlets like NYT but capitalized on small contributions from individual contributors. A ruling in favor of copyright would force OpenAI to shut down - but given their impressive demo of the tech, I hope we'd see more open and accessible versions of these models emerge. As impressive as ChatGPT is, I dislike having my access to information governed by some large corporate entity. I also dislike a company directly capitalizing on my contributions without my explicit consent.
- aa1234556 3y ago
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- traveler01 3y ago
  For me the question is highly debatable. As far as I'm aware the training of AI works by crawling various content from the Internet, so they're using a product, which are NY articles to train an AI, meaning they're using their content to help creating a product. But in this sense, shouldn't they be suing Google as well? Since Google as a search engine, also crawls the web and shows their articles in their search results, usually it may even use them for those quick answers features. My 5 cents on this are that NY Times noticed OpenAI has deep pockets, they may have ground to sue and decides to try their look in order to get some quick easy money. Now, I don't know if what OpenAI is doing with ChatGPT does not fall under fair use.

voytec 3y ago

> if a federal judge finds that OpenAI illegally copied The Times' articles to train its AI model, the court could order the company to destroy ChatGPT's dataset, forcing the company to recreate it using only work that it is authorized to use. I'd like to see it happening but it sounds unrealistic.

throwaway290 3y ago
I think it's the most natural way it would happen. Pit powerful interests (publishers) against powerful interests (Microsoft/ClosedAI). The only surprising thing is it's taking publishers so long to notice this fresh abuse of copyright at grand scale will cost them.
- gmerc 3y ago
  Which is why OpenAIs GTM strategy involves the biggest players in each industry. That said, the outcome is unlikely - we have trained AI for more than a decade as ‘fair use’ at this point, it’s the application of the technology that is shifting the perspective, nor the act of training. Every computer vision system in the world is trained on mostly public data for example. Furthermore, the LLMs purpose is not to generate news so NYT will have to argue about the value of archive data. Many jurisdictions have thresholds of how much of an original work contributes to the derivative before it would be considered not fair use or plagiarism. Given the size of the datasets - good luck.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    > we have trained AI for more than a decade as ‘fair use’ at this point Fair use is about use. Spellchecking ML, search engine ML, etc. all different than ML that produces content.
aero-glide2 3y ago
If I read 1000s of of NYT articles to improve my writing skills, add then write an article of my own, is that a copyright violation?

baby-yoda 3y ago

These mega LLMs that can autonomously roam the web and consume original content are basically the "I made this" meme[0] and having some legal precedent would be good for all users of the web. [0] - https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-made-this https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-made-this

petesergeant 3y ago
> having some legal precedent would be good for all users of the web Honestly that's true whichever way it falls. The sooner it's clear what's allowed and what's not, the better for everyone.

aero-glide2 3y ago

Copyrights and patents are holding back humanity.

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
Somebody posted this link in a comment on a thread the other day: https://news.artnet.com/market/koch-brother-loses-it-on-air-after-blowing-millions-on-bogus-wine-41162 https://news.artnet.com/market/koch-brother-loses-it-on-air-... And it occurred to me that this is precisely the thing that's holding back humanity: "Koch estimates that he has spent $25 million on legal fees—far more than the $5 million he originally spent on the fake wine itself." We have a legal system that is completely inaccessible to the average man. That it can generate $25M in civil legal fees is beyond absurd. Patents and copyrights derive much of their force from the fact that they are enforced by a legal process where to play is to lose. There's no winning. It's no longer about justice, and it has largely become a form of financial bullying where entrenched interests beat up on smaller ones. Fix the legal system -- make it accessible -- and you've fixed patents and copyrights. To address this thread's point: I believe that AI, and perhaps _only_ AI, might be able to help with this.
- emporas 3y ago
  Two friends of mine, created a pretty good song some time back in 2013, and they tried to copyright it. One lawyer and mutual friend of mine and the band, asked for 200 euros to copyright just that one song. Later they realized, they could copyright the song for just 30 euros. On some other totally unrelated news, my parents knew a person who sold en mass music on cassettes illegally copied from other cassettes back in the 80s. He bought a BMW and build a house just from that. I was friends with his grandson when we were teenagers, and his grandson didn't care to play basketball or football or anything like that. He was obsessed with listening to music and memorize all the lyrics and stuff.
  - layer8 3y ago
    You don’t have to “copyright” a creative work in Europe for it to enjoy copyright protection. It automatically does so by virtue of being a creative work.

machdiamonds 3y ago

Don't humans operate similarly? We gain knowledge through experiences. These AI models effectively condense a vast amount of experience data into weights. Considering the global race in AI advancements, I'm skeptical about the success of these copyright claims. I do find it hypocritical that OpenAI says that other LLMs can't be trained on data generated by their LLMs.

villgax 3y ago
True
LatteLazy 3y ago
Not just humans in general, the NYT specifically relies on the fact news cannot be copyrighted. Then claims it's articles are sacred...
- dspillett 3y ago
  IIRC the distinction is that facts can't be copyrighted, a particular arrangement of facts can, particularly if something more subjective (analysis or opinion) is included. So I can write my own article about the sky being shown to appear blue much of the time, but I can't copy someone else's article about the same subject.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    How would one even go about a phonebook-style mechanical listing of facts and occurrences? You’re listing an impossibility and then saying that garden-variety connective sentences somehow make it not a factual listing. Like yes if you copy a NYT article verbatim it’s like copying a phone book ads and all, and that’s infringement. But that’s not what a LLM does, NYT doesn’t like their content being used and summarized at all, even in a rearranged form that merely relies on the factual information included in the article. That’s what they want to get paid for, and unfortunately that’s not copyrightable and OpenAI is correct they don’t have to pay for that. NYT disagrees but again, they are kinda attempting to claim copyright on the factual information because they wrote some connective sentences between.

gmerc 3y ago

Social media, especially Facebook and Google News devalued news by commoditizing it. News is trying to avoid the next generation of tech doing that to the long tail of data.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

pimterry 3y ago

Honestly, I think generative AI losing a massive copyright showdown is inevitable at this stage. It's extremely easy to get the latest generation of AIs to produce outputs that in many fields sans-AI would be trivially considered as IP infringement. While there are many interesting reasonable legal & technical arguments that it's not, the result completely undermines copyright protections regardless. If that's accepted at scale, copyright in practice will change completely. In effect, the choices are "block this, or entirely destroy copyright protections in many industries". You can't allow this without eventually allowing everybody to simulate their own NY Times reporters, produce their own Marvel movies, and create their own Taylor Swift albums. If you do allow that, the many many affected industries have catastrophic problems. Problematic though copyright laws are, I see no world where all those protections go away any time soon, and so if the courts don't agree to protect copyright already in this scenario, then it will eventually be legislated to make that happen. AI consuming copyrighted data and producing an output has to be considered a derivative work (or indeed, the model itself will be considered a derivative work) or IP protections are effectively broken. There's a grace period now while we work our way there, but the politics is pretty clear and with no plausible path to "let's drop copyright completely" ASAP, I just don't see any other result in the medium term. Doesn't mean the end of generative AI by any means, just a slowdown as we move to a world where you need to negotiate rights and buy data to feed it first, instead of scraping everybody else's for free.

Pannoniae 3y ago
Or on the converse: if those industries are unviable without copyright protection, they could go away entirely. This is a plausible path to "drop copyright entirely", just like encryption was dropped as an export-controlled technology in the late 90s. (remember the 40-bit "international" SSL?) OpenAI etc. have huge amounts of money behind them, they very well have a fighting chance in court to defend their usage of scraping the internet.
- pimterry 3y ago
  > if those industries are unviable without copyright protection, they could go away entirely. These creative industries include all of software development, music, TV, movies, books, media, art, etc. You do technically solve the problem of copyright by shutting all those down, but I'm not sure it's a solution anybody will vote for. If you can come up with a serious alternative though, which can sustain those creative industries without requiring copyright, now is probably the best moment in all of history to seize the day and make that happen. There's going to be a big shake-up regardless, it's the perfect chance for alternative models. Bear in mind that dropping copyright entirely doesn't just hurt Disney and Sony Music though - with no copyright the GPL and all other open-source licenses are unenforceable, anybody can copy & sell anybody else's art or design without permission, Spotify doesn't have to pay musicians even $0.01 any more, etc etc etc. It's not an easy problem.

villgax 3y ago

Sue these hypocritical fair-use citers who prevent people from training on their own outputs. Force them to reveal their entire training set for generating oblong statments

pierrefermat1 3y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFKV48ikV5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFKV48ikV5E Relevant to the article: Large Language Models Meet Copyright Law at Simons

PeterisP 3y ago

I think that the proper outcome for all of this would be acknowledgement that the current copyright laws very poorly regulate this aspect, that the key parts of any such legal action are at the not-really-described edges of law because these edges weren't relevant until now; and so instead of waiting for courts ruling on how law-as-written-now applies and accepting these rulings, we will likely get some new legislation explicitly setting what the legal norms should be. In the short term, of course, the existing law matters, but the main discussion should be not on how to apply existing law but how to ensure that the new laws match what we-the-people would want.

theragra 3y ago
100% this. But I doubt it will happen in the US, unfortunately.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  The tech industry has sufficient money and influence for lobbying to push this one through. The media industry did the DMCA adjustments to copyright reasonably fast, and tech industry is even more powerful and wealthy.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    Yeah but in this case there are extremely influential forces on both sides of the issue. I think when this happens it is normally easier to block a law than to push it through, so I expect the current laws will remain for the short/medium term.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

If writing a few paragraphs around something someone else said is copyrightable to you then isn’t GPT writing a few paragraphs around your work copyrightable to OpenAI too…

ojosilva 3y ago

IANAL, but copyright protections are pretty much tied to content and format and not to the idea itself, with the intent of preventing (or putting a price on) the copying of original works. The Times will have a very hard time proving that their content is being re-marketed by OpenAI. Having a competing product based on your ideas. Compare: "Steve Jobs [was] a tyrant": https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/steve-jobs-defended-his-work-with-a-barbed-tongue.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/steve-jobs-def... Against: "Whether to describe SJ as a tyrant is a matter of perspective...": https://chat.openai.com/share/28633f0c-007f-48b6-a615-1581c3ef3041 https://chat.openai.com/share/28633f0c-007f-48b6-a615-1581c3... The general way LLMs work do not preserve content in it's original form: the ideas they contain are extracted and clustered statistically - as a ELI5 refresher, an LLM reads 2 million NY Times articles and records that after the word "Steve" there are a lot of "Jobs" followed by a lot of "was a genius/tyrant", "founded Apple", etc. Then LLMs recreate the user question "Who was Steve Jobs?" using this complex net of token/word stats. Is that fair use? I think OpenAI lawyers will not even tap the fair use question, they will simply state that no copy happened, just a statistical collection of words from various sources. And importantly: no LLM source is really prevalent, so the end result cannot be even be traced back to the source, especially if multiple, similar news sources are being fed to training. I have no idea how the Times is going to prove that its _theirs_ news.

simion314 3y ago
>The general way LLMs work do not preserve content in it's original form: the ideas they contain are extracted and clustered statistically - as a Is the way LLM work relevant? I can make a shitty script that has as input Microsoft proprietary code and as output something identical in purpose but the text is completely different, I would rename names with synonyms, swap some things around etc. I am not against AIs, my opinion is that if your AI uses GPL code the output should be GPL, if it uses public domain images the output should be public domain images. I mean for code if AI is actual intelligent you should be able to train an AI with C with just a few books and not with the entire GitHub open source code (and notice MS did not trained copilot on the proprietary code they have access proving they are not confident that they are in the right).

olgeni 3y ago

They own copyright on hallucinating weapons of mass destruction? :D

boobalyboo 3y ago

[flagged]

konschubert 3y ago
That’s not how copyright works.
- boobalyboo 3y ago
  [dead]

oefrha 3y ago

Hopefully soon enough (within a decade?) we’ll all be able to run large language models on cheap consumer devices, and model weights containing everything including NYT will be floating around in the form of warez readily consumed by anyone with a modicum of savvy, whether NYT likes them or not. They can’t stop progress.

t_luke 3y ago

The precedent people should be paying much more attention to is sampling in music. When it first arose, it really wasn’t clear what status it had. There was at least a decade when people basically thought it was legal to use small samples of other recordings because they were small and the new use turned them into something unrecognisably different. Which was kind of logical, actually, but turned out not to be true! The current legal requirement to get clearance for all samples only arose after a bunch of court cases in the late 80s/ early 90s, mostly involving quite obscure musicians. There are a lot of people on here who assume that ‘logic will prevail’ in the courts on questions like use of copyrighted data in training data. History shows that this really isn’t a safe assumption. The courts have historically been extremely favorable to copyright holders. It would be foolish to underestimate the legal risk to openai et al here

honeybadger1 3y ago

A skirmish to not use our collective acquired knowledge and hide it behind selfish...capitalist gain.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

“In the end lawyers saved humanity from an all powerful AI.”

vldchk 3y ago

While (in general) I agree with arguments against “copywriting hell”, in particular this case it is not about copywriting itself, but about the consequences of GenAI to entire industry. Journalists exist not without a reason, yes they work with facts and very often — open facts, but they still assemble those facts in certain way to construct a narrative, connect dots and tell us some story (not counting cases when journalist works with their sources and produce a unique inside information). Then OpenAI comes, says “thank you very much” and assemble all of journalists work into one Uber Knowledgeable Journalist who can answer all of your questions. So far so good, we create a public good service, and copywriters are in shambles. Until you start making money on it. That’s where the problem. If OpenAI would be a non profit organization like Wiki Foundation, who just wants to make internet as better place — not much arguments you can find to support NYT lawsuit. But monetization changes everything. Basically NYT is not worried about re using its text as itself, it is worried that no one will want to visit NYT no more and will pay Microsoft/Google and get all answers from them. Let’s put an example. There were a famous story when FT journalist discover a massive fraud in Wirecard accounting and essentially lead to a death of this organization. That articles were a result of multi-year reporting work when journalist piece by piece and step by step collect facts, meet people, and eventually spot the gap. Now, in age of Bard/Bing/ChatGPT, you don’t need to read original article to know all of this. You can ask search engine or Chatbot and get essential re phrasing of an original reporter work. You don’t need no more to go to FT, pay them for paywall, watch their ads, etc. Effectively FT make a huge investment into their people to allow them spend 2 years on this issue and report it and now have a 0 leads to their website because all of them are eaten by Google and Microsoft who will sell you their ads and retain you in their monetized products. Imagine that you built a for-profit paid library for some task. You make a code available through paywall and ask people to pay you to get to it and solve their problems. Then Microsoft comes, sneak beyond paywall, scrap your code and publish it recompiled and slightly optimized version in open access, so no one longer ever need to go on your website but ask Microsoft to show them your code. Would you be happy? All of this cases for me make this case not such easy and straightforward as it seems to be “bad copywriters against progress of humanity”. At the end of the day, if NYT/FT/New Yorker and others will stop publishing their work and fire all journalists, will ChatGPT tell us same depth level stories as we read there?

zb3 3y ago

It's time to abolish copyright.

toss1 3y ago

>>A top concern for The Times is that ChatGPT is, in a sense, becoming a direct competitor with the paper by creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper's staff. This seems to me to be completely standard in the newspaper industry. Many times every week, I see stories in the form "The [Major_News_Outlet] reports that [Event_X occurred] or [their investigation revealed Y] and here are the details [...]. Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. If you write a history of Issac Newton or the invention of semiconductors, I cannot copy that wholesale and sell it as mine, but nothing prevents me writing my own version, even using the same facts and citing your work. I'm quite sure that I could provide a service where a bunch of workers read NYT articles and write brief summaries. I'm not sure they would even need citations, as long as we don't copy chunks wholesale. If OpenAI is simply parroting the words of the NYT articles without Fair Use constraints (short blurbs), it seems they have a problem. If they are fully re-writing them into short non-copying summaries, it seems the NYT has a problem. It'll be interesting to see how the courts sort this out.

robbywashere_ 3y ago

incoming backroom payment deals with publishers. "OpenAI now features training data from our partners X, Y, and Z"

mediumsmart 3y ago

I think anybody should have the right to protect the word combinations they own by not publishing them on the internet.

Shawnj2 3y ago
Copyright law doesn’t stop applying because your website is accessible over the internet. I think generative AI is cool but training an AI to do the thing you do using your words is pretty clearly not allowed under current copyright law, and not only that but it makes people who use AI look like bad people who are fine stealing other people’s work for their own enjoyment.

exabrial 3y ago

Good. Literally anyone’s copyrighted comments on the internet should get a settlement

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

"I'll keep saying it every time this comes up. I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted writing verbatim." Personally I think they argue that way because they get off on being contrarian out of spite, but to me it's just a signal of maliciousness and stupidity all at once.