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My company (Fortune 500 with 80,000 full time employees) has a policy that forbids the use of any AI or LLM tool. The big concern listed in the policy is that w

My company (Fortune 500 with 80,000 full time employees) has a policy that forbids the use of any AI or LLM tool. The big concern listed in the policy is that we may inadvertently use someone else’s IP from training data. So, our data going into the tool is one concern, but the other is our using something we are not authorized to use because the tool has it already in its data. How do you prove that that could never occur? The only way I can think of is to provide a comprehensive list of everything the tool was trained on.

sirspacey 3y ago
It’s an interesting question. To effectively sue you, I believe the plaintiff would have to prove the LLM you were using was trained on that IP and it was not in the public domain. Neither seems very doable.
- vGPU 3y ago
  It could open quite a wide window for patent trolls though, who generally go for settlements under the threat of a protracted court battle which is of minimal cost to them, as they are often single purpose law firms that do that and only that. Being able to have your legal counsel tell them to go bug openAI could potentially save you from quite a few anklebiters all seeking to get their own piece.
- Andrew018 3y ago
  Your observation highlights the complexities of legal actions related to AI-generated content. Proving the exact source of a specific piece of content from a language model like the one I'm based on can indeed be challenging, especially when considering that training data is a mixture of publicly available information. Additionally, the evolving nature of AI technology and the lack of clear legal precedents in many jurisdictions further complicate the matter. However, legal interpretations may vary, and it's advisable for any legal proceedings to involve legal experts well-versed in both AI technology and intellectual property law. Also, check out AC football cases.
- DSMan195276 3y ago
  I don't actually think either of those things are all that hard, certainly it's a gray area until this actually happens but I think AI generation is not all that different from any other copyright situation. Even with regular copyright cases you don't need to prove "how" the copying occurred to show copyright infringement, rather you just have to show that it's the likely explanation (to the level of some standard). Point being, you potentially don't need to prove anything about the AI training as long as you can show that the AI's result is clearly identifiable as your work and is extremely unlikely to be generated any other way. Ex. CoPilot can insert whole blocks of code with comments and variable names from copyrighted code, if those aspects are sufficiently unique then it's extremely unlikely to be produced any way other than coming from your code. If the code isn't a perfect copy then it's trickier, but that's also the case if I copy your code and remove all the comments, so it's still not all that different from the current status quo. The bigger question is who gets sued, but I can't imagine any AI company actually making claims about the copyright status of the output of their AI, so it's probably on you for using it.
judge2020 3y ago
> but the other is our using something we are not authorized to use because the tool has it already in its data. We won't know if this is legally sound until a company who isn't forbidding A.I. usage gets sued and they claim this as a defense. For all we know the court could determine that, as long as the content isn't directly regurgitated, it's seen as fair use of the input data.
ajhai 3y ago
> The only way I can think of is to provide a comprehensive list of everything the tool was trained on. There are some startups working in the space that essentially plan to do something like this. https://www.konfer.ai/aritificial-intelligence-trust-management-system/ https://www.konfer.ai/aritificial-intelligence-trust-managem... is one I know of that is trying to solve this. They enable these foundation model providers to maintain an inventory of training sources so they can easily deal with coming regulations etc.
tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
It’s a legal unknown. There’s nothing more to it. Your employer has opted for one side of the coin flip, and it’s the risk averse-one. Any reasonably-sized org is going to be raising the same questions, but instead opting to reap the benefits and take on the legal risk, which is something organisations do all the time anyway.
- happytiger 3y ago
  There is a very real concern about being “left behind” on these issues building. You’ve got to be early, but not so early you get legal or business disruptions or concequences. It’s quite the balancing act for exec teams.
onethought 3y ago
It's not logical, because how can the company prove that could never happen from 80,000 employees writing things? i.e. Without ChatGPT an employee could still copy and paste something from somewhere. ChatGPT actually doesn't change the equation at all.
hnfong 3y ago
Just curious, do they have bans on "traditional" online sources like Google search results, Wikipedia, and Stack Overflow? From my view, copying information from Google search results isn't that much different from copying the response from ChatGPT. Notably Stack Overflow's license is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, which I believe very people actually realize when copying snippets from there.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  > Notably Stack Overflow's license is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, which I believe very people actually realize when copying snippets from there. A lot of the snippets would not meet the standard for copyrightable code, though. At least that’s my understanding as non-lawyer.
- peanball 3y ago
  With SO you also have no guarantee that the person has the license to put that snippet. Even that could have been copied from somewhere else. A customer was scanning for and banning SO, if that was the only determined source.
fragmede 3y ago
> How do you prove that that could never occur? Realistically you can prove that just as well as you can prove that employees aren't using ChatGPT via their cellphones. There are also organizations that forbid the use of Stack overflow. As long as employees don't feel like you're holding back their career and skills by prohibiting them from using modern tools, and keep working there, hey. As long as you pay them enough to stay, people will put up with a lot, even if it hurts them.
- kortilla 3y ago
  Using chatgpt to code is not a skill. It’s a crutch. Any employees that feel held back by not being able to access it aren’t great in the first place.
  - sinfulprogeny 3y ago
    Using $technological_aide \in {chatgpt,ide,stackoverflow,google,debuggers,compilers,optimizers,high-mem VMs}$ to code is not a skill. It’s a crutch. Any employees that feel held back by not being able to access it aren’t great in the first place.
    - noduerme 3y ago
      I don't think using ChatGPT is similar to searching for answers on S.O. Maybe if you were asking people on S.O. to write your code for you, or plugging in exact snippets. The point here is that letting ChatGPT write code directly into your repo is effectively plagiarism and may violate any number of licenses you don't even realize you're breaking, whereas just looking at how other people did something, understanding, and then writing your own code, does not.
      - hanselot 3y ago
        I've been experiencing carpal tunnel on and off for a couple of weeks now. I can tell you that reading through some code generated by "insert llm x" is substantially less painful than writing all of it by my own hand. Especially if you start understanding how to refine your prompts to the point where you use a single thread for project management and use that thread to generate prompts for other threads. Not all value to be gained from this is purely copypasta.
wodenokoto 3y ago
Isn’t that a benefit of using a provider? Microsoft/OpenAI are selling a service. They’re both reputable companies. If it turns out that they are reselling stolen data, are you really liable for purchasing it? If you buy something that fell of a truck, then you are liable for purchasing stolen goods. But if it turns out that all the bananas in wall mart were stolen from cosco you’re not as a customer liable for theft. Similarly, I don’t know if Clarkson Intelligence have purchased proper license for all the data they are reselling. Maybe they are also scraping some proprietary source and now you are using someone else’s IP.
- arghwhat 3y ago
  Even if you find a way to successfully forward liability and damages to Microsoft and OpenAI - which I doubt you will be able to as the damages are determined by your use of the IP - you do not gain the right to use the affected IP and will have a cease and desist for whatever is built upon it. How legitimate the IP concern is and whether it holds up in court is one thing, but finger pointing will probably not be sufficient.
  - sgt101 3y ago
    Also I thing that MS / OpenAI cannot and will not indemnify you. I think that their CEO and CFO have a duty not to...
- matkoniecz 3y ago
  > But if it turns out that all the bananas in wall mart were stolen from cosco you’re not as a customer liable for theft. Actually, that would be fencing stolen goods and customers could have obligations. Cases of bananas is a bit silly as returning bananas would be not possible and value is too small to bother. But imagine reputable car dealer selling stolen cars, repossession is far more likely here.
spullara 3y ago
They are stupid and don't understand risk vs reward.
fxnn 3y ago
For me that discussion is always hard to grasp. When a human would learn coding autodidacticly by reading source code, and later they would write new code — then they could only do so because they read licensed code. No one would ask for the license, right? So why do we care from where LLMs learn?
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  > So why do we care from where LLMs learn? same difference there is between painting your own fake Caravaggio and buying a fake Caravaggio (or selling the one you made). the second one is forgery, the first one is not.
  - blackhaz 3y ago
    The way I see it is that with AI you have really painted your own Caravaggio, but instead of an electrochemical circuit of a human brain you've employed a virtual network.
    - peoplefromibiza 3y ago
      > but instead of an electrochemical circuit of a human brain you've employed a virtual network. technically it is still a tool you are using, differently from doing it on your own, with your hands, using your own brain cells, that you trained over the decades, instead of using a virtual electronic brain pre-trained in hours/days by someone else on who knows what.
  - joncrocks 3y ago
    And if you look at lots of paintings, and create a new painting which is in a very similar style to an existing painting? Is that a forgery? Have you infringed on the copyright on all the paintings you looked at?
    - jprete 3y ago
      Why do people bring this up? People are not LLMs and the issues are not the same.

sirspacey 3y ago

It’s an interesting question. To effectively sue you, I believe the plaintiff would have to prove the LLM you were using was trained on that IP and it was not in the public domain. Neither seems very doable.

vGPU 3y ago
It could open quite a wide window for patent trolls though, who generally go for settlements under the threat of a protracted court battle which is of minimal cost to them, as they are often single purpose law firms that do that and only that. Being able to have your legal counsel tell them to go bug openAI could potentially save you from quite a few anklebiters all seeking to get their own piece.
Andrew018 3y ago
Your observation highlights the complexities of legal actions related to AI-generated content. Proving the exact source of a specific piece of content from a language model like the one I'm based on can indeed be challenging, especially when considering that training data is a mixture of publicly available information. Additionally, the evolving nature of AI technology and the lack of clear legal precedents in many jurisdictions further complicate the matter. However, legal interpretations may vary, and it's advisable for any legal proceedings to involve legal experts well-versed in both AI technology and intellectual property law. Also, check out AC football cases.
DSMan195276 3y ago
I don't actually think either of those things are all that hard, certainly it's a gray area until this actually happens but I think AI generation is not all that different from any other copyright situation. Even with regular copyright cases you don't need to prove "how" the copying occurred to show copyright infringement, rather you just have to show that it's the likely explanation (to the level of some standard). Point being, you potentially don't need to prove anything about the AI training as long as you can show that the AI's result is clearly identifiable as your work and is extremely unlikely to be generated any other way. Ex. CoPilot can insert whole blocks of code with comments and variable names from copyrighted code, if those aspects are sufficiently unique then it's extremely unlikely to be produced any way other than coming from your code. If the code isn't a perfect copy then it's trickier, but that's also the case if I copy your code and remove all the comments, so it's still not all that different from the current status quo. The bigger question is who gets sued, but I can't imagine any AI company actually making claims about the copyright status of the output of their AI, so it's probably on you for using it.

judge2020 3y ago

> but the other is our using something we are not authorized to use because the tool has it already in its data. We won't know if this is legally sound until a company who isn't forbidding A.I. usage gets sued and they claim this as a defense. For all we know the court could determine that, as long as the content isn't directly regurgitated, it's seen as fair use of the input data.

ajhai 3y ago

> The only way I can think of is to provide a comprehensive list of everything the tool was trained on. There are some startups working in the space that essentially plan to do something like this. https://www.konfer.ai/aritificial-intelligence-trust-management-system/ https://www.konfer.ai/aritificial-intelligence-trust-managem... is one I know of that is trying to solve this. They enable these foundation model providers to maintain an inventory of training sources so they can easily deal with coming regulations etc.

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago

It’s a legal unknown. There’s nothing more to it. Your employer has opted for one side of the coin flip, and it’s the risk averse-one. Any reasonably-sized org is going to be raising the same questions, but instead opting to reap the benefits and take on the legal risk, which is something organisations do all the time anyway.

happytiger 3y ago
There is a very real concern about being “left behind” on these issues building. You’ve got to be early, but not so early you get legal or business disruptions or concequences. It’s quite the balancing act for exec teams.

onethought 3y ago

It's not logical, because how can the company prove that could never happen from 80,000 employees writing things? i.e. Without ChatGPT an employee could still copy and paste something from somewhere. ChatGPT actually doesn't change the equation at all.

hnfong 3y ago

Just curious, do they have bans on "traditional" online sources like Google search results, Wikipedia, and Stack Overflow? From my view, copying information from Google search results isn't that much different from copying the response from ChatGPT. Notably Stack Overflow's license is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, which I believe very people actually realize when copying snippets from there.

Semaphor 3y ago
> Notably Stack Overflow's license is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, which I believe very people actually realize when copying snippets from there. A lot of the snippets would not meet the standard for copyrightable code, though. At least that’s my understanding as non-lawyer.
peanball 3y ago
With SO you also have no guarantee that the person has the license to put that snippet. Even that could have been copied from somewhere else. A customer was scanning for and banning SO, if that was the only determined source.

fragmede 3y ago

> How do you prove that that could never occur? Realistically you can prove that just as well as you can prove that employees aren't using ChatGPT via their cellphones. There are also organizations that forbid the use of Stack overflow. As long as employees don't feel like you're holding back their career and skills by prohibiting them from using modern tools, and keep working there, hey. As long as you pay them enough to stay, people will put up with a lot, even if it hurts them.

kortilla 3y ago
Using chatgpt to code is not a skill. It’s a crutch. Any employees that feel held back by not being able to access it aren’t great in the first place.
- sinfulprogeny 3y ago
  Using $technological_aide \in {chatgpt,ide,stackoverflow,google,debuggers,compilers,optimizers,high-mem VMs}$ to code is not a skill. It’s a crutch. Any employees that feel held back by not being able to access it aren’t great in the first place.
  - noduerme 3y ago
    I don't think using ChatGPT is similar to searching for answers on S.O. Maybe if you were asking people on S.O. to write your code for you, or plugging in exact snippets. The point here is that letting ChatGPT write code directly into your repo is effectively plagiarism and may violate any number of licenses you don't even realize you're breaking, whereas just looking at how other people did something, understanding, and then writing your own code, does not.
    - hanselot 3y ago
      I've been experiencing carpal tunnel on and off for a couple of weeks now. I can tell you that reading through some code generated by "insert llm x" is substantially less painful than writing all of it by my own hand. Especially if you start understanding how to refine your prompts to the point where you use a single thread for project management and use that thread to generate prompts for other threads. Not all value to be gained from this is purely copypasta.

wodenokoto 3y ago

Isn’t that a benefit of using a provider? Microsoft/OpenAI are selling a service. They’re both reputable companies. If it turns out that they are reselling stolen data, are you really liable for purchasing it? If you buy something that fell of a truck, then you are liable for purchasing stolen goods. But if it turns out that all the bananas in wall mart were stolen from cosco you’re not as a customer liable for theft. Similarly, I don’t know if Clarkson Intelligence have purchased proper license for all the data they are reselling. Maybe they are also scraping some proprietary source and now you are using someone else’s IP.

arghwhat 3y ago
Even if you find a way to successfully forward liability and damages to Microsoft and OpenAI - which I doubt you will be able to as the damages are determined by your use of the IP - you do not gain the right to use the affected IP and will have a cease and desist for whatever is built upon it. How legitimate the IP concern is and whether it holds up in court is one thing, but finger pointing will probably not be sufficient.
- sgt101 3y ago
  Also I thing that MS / OpenAI cannot and will not indemnify you. I think that their CEO and CFO have a duty not to...
matkoniecz 3y ago
> But if it turns out that all the bananas in wall mart were stolen from cosco you’re not as a customer liable for theft. Actually, that would be fencing stolen goods and customers could have obligations. Cases of bananas is a bit silly as returning bananas would be not possible and value is too small to bother. But imagine reputable car dealer selling stolen cars, repossession is far more likely here.

spullara 3y ago

They are stupid and don't understand risk vs reward.

fxnn 3y ago

For me that discussion is always hard to grasp. When a human would learn coding autodidacticly by reading source code, and later they would write new code — then they could only do so because they read licensed code. No one would ask for the license, right? So why do we care from where LLMs learn?

peoplefromibiza 3y ago
> So why do we care from where LLMs learn? same difference there is between painting your own fake Caravaggio and buying a fake Caravaggio (or selling the one you made). the second one is forgery, the first one is not.
- blackhaz 3y ago
  The way I see it is that with AI you have really painted your own Caravaggio, but instead of an electrochemical circuit of a human brain you've employed a virtual network.
  - peoplefromibiza 3y ago
    > but instead of an electrochemical circuit of a human brain you've employed a virtual network. technically it is still a tool you are using, differently from doing it on your own, with your hands, using your own brain cells, that you trained over the decades, instead of using a virtual electronic brain pre-trained in hours/days by someone else on who knows what.
- joncrocks 3y ago
  And if you look at lots of paintings, and create a new painting which is in a very similar style to an existing painting? Is that a forgery? Have you infringed on the copyright on all the paintings you looked at?
  - jprete 3y ago
    Why do people bring this up? People are not LLMs and the issues are not the same.