7 ms·

The copyright fight over authors and OpenAI's ChatGPT

41 points by webmaven 3y ago

spandextwins 3y ago
AI will win. Just like Napster liberated music, AI will liberate knowledge. Only problem is those creating AI now. It's a silent arms race. Tempered by global interest rates. Who will win?
- Etheryte 3y ago
  I'm not entirely sure if I would agree with what you say about Napster. While for a while what you said was true, these days we're back to most people listening to music in walled gardens like Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
  - brookst 3y ago
    The lesson of walled gardens is that people will pay for curation. That’s endlessly irritating to some people, but that doesn’t change the truth of it.
    - pwython 3y ago
      People will pay more for convenience. A music streaming service with access to millions of songs is the same price per month of what a single artist's CD was 20 years ago. Sure, you don't have a cool physical copy, but it's incredibly convenient to search for any song in seconds, play it instantly, and not worry about storage, etc.
      - wincy 3y ago
        And I don’t have to download it, copy it to my phone, make sure the mp3 metadata is correct for the song, and I can view the lyrics, and easily share the song with a friend, and make a playlist. I have a 50GB collection of MP3s on my desktop from my teens and 20s that have been collecting dust because I just use Spotify because it’s convenient.
  - Levitz 3y ago
    Spotify was created in a market in which piracy was widespread. I'm not sure we can assume it would have ever been a thing otherwise.
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    Spotify/Steam/Netflix only exist in the form they do because piracy is such a compelling alternative.
- klabb3 3y ago
  Napster was an opinionated (political even) piece of tech built for a specific purpose. AI is not like that. And even if ChatGPT currently gives you something nice, it’s not controlled by you and can be nerfed and extort you. You’d need to make an argument that AI will be good for people. It’s not self evident.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nimski 3y ago
"The difference, when it comes to AI, is one of scale. ChatGPT can “read” more published words in a few seconds than I could in several lifetimes and, unlike me, that data isn’t immediately replaced in my human-limited short-term memory by whatever I’m thinking of next." I think this misses the point. The issue of scale isn't on the ingest side, it's on the output side. Once you train an LLM on a book (however long that takes), then the LLM can be the interface to that book for an unlimited number of users. That scales very differently to, say, a person reading a book and writing something influenced by it. In the case of the LLM, it's a complete interface to the contents of the book. It lets you "talk to the book". If that exists, why would anyone buy the book? If I could ask ChatGPT to "summarize the new book by XYZ", then spend an hour or two asking the questions _I_ have about the book from it, then buying the book would be a net negative. If we don't solve attribution (like BMI solved for music), then the financial upside of publishing might be majority-captured by whoever trains LLMs on the copyrighted material.
- hnfong 3y ago
  By your argument, writing summaries of books, "explain <book> in 3 minutes" youtube videos, and commentaries on books should be made illegal too. Or more precisely, they should be made illegal if and only if they achieve "scale" of maybe at least a couple million viewers. The fundamental premise of copyright is flawed. Taking medieval concepts involving censorship of the printing press and extending them to the 21st century is bound to produce awkward results. I'm not hopeful that copyrights will be reconsidered from the ground up during this AI shock, but at least we shouldn't pretend that any arguments about copyrights should be reasonable and make sense. I honestly believe a "realpolitik" approach is more helpful, at least we know that those with more political influence and spend more effort lobbying will probably "win" in the end...
  - nimski 3y ago
    I appreciate the example, but here's where I think it differs as an analogy of what LLMs do: A summary doesn't have infinite or variable depth. If you read the summary of a non-fiction (I'll limit my argument to that, as another poster pointed out) book, and either aren't convinced, or want to learn more about the matter, you'd have to purchase the book. An LLM that has ben trained on the book, if somehow designed not to hallucinate, would be able to answer any question you have about the book at any depth, seamlessly blending in material from other books to answer a question or explain a concept. That seems like an entirely better experience than reading the book from start-to-finish. I don't see how the original can compete.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
This is personal for me, as I have a large dataset (near books3 sized) in my specialized domain that I tried to publish an NLP paper for. Excellent scores but I was too honest about the fact that some stuff in my evidence was gathered from paywalled sources. Despite excellent conference scores, the senior area chair intervened and they rejected the paper. Seems that the current copyright fights are having a chilling effect in the context of research on language resources and datasets. This is extremely sad. I expected the academic AI world to have a bit more institutional compassion for copyright abolitionism…
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Modern copyright law is so far behind the times and broken in more ways one can count. The only sensible way one can deal with it is to ignore it and keep their mouth shut. Say for example, the Mistral AI approach. The released Mistral 7B and destroyed every other model in its class in performance while giving it a much less restrictive license. They gave zero info about what they trained on... and nobody is asking. A very smart move from both sides that benefits just about everyone. The only winning move is not to play.
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    I suspect they’re covered under fair use (for now) but also nobody cares because the larger models are the ones that get used by people who would care enough to be upset about it.
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      Everyone claims fair use, but the terms for that are pretty narrow and wouldn't hold up anywhere afaik. Unless you're doing a news report or a review with actual criticism it probably won't pass the smell test. An LLM definitely doesn't fit that description in the slightest.
      - ShamelessC 3y ago
        I maintain my position that despite whatever moral or ethical quandaries you feel are being violated, “no one cares”.
WalterBright 3y ago
If I read a book, adding its contents to my brain, and then having that content influence what I write on HN, is that a copyright violation?
- Jensson 3y ago
  If you say you are retelling the story and then are writing down the story chapter for chapter, yes. That is what LLMs can do, they don't write something inspired by it they write down a copy of it with switched out words and grammar structure. It doesn't matter if you personally aren't using them like that, the fact that they can be used like that is the problem.
  - famouswaffles 3y ago
    >That is what LLMs can do, they don't write something inspired by it they write down a copy of it with switched out words and grammar structure. That's not at all what they do. This myth of "supercharged interpolation" really needs to die. https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09485 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09485 >It doesn't matter if you personally aren't using them like that, the fact that they can be used like that is the problem. Of course it matters. You penalize people when they have done something wrong not if they have the capacity to.
- rafaelmn 3y ago
  Let's not pretend copyright and intellectual property is somehow grounded in reality or logic. IP laws will have to get updated for generative AI - what that looks like will be determined by interest groups in play and legislators.
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  I’d say no because comparing a human brain to chatGPT isn’t really fair nor am I sure they work in identical way. chatGPT can and have spat out raw content it was trained on. You understand the words you read in a book, you get the message out of it and are able to resonate and have thoughts. ChatGPT doesn’t, it just scrambles words based on statistics. You, writing content based on your influence should not be counted as copyright violation in my opinion. But giving some credit isn’t a bad practice either. If you did copy and paste the contents of the book and call it yours, then that should be counted as copyright violation (there are probably exceptions to this). I think what some people are currently against is openai (closed ai) scraping all kinds of content on the web and build a fantastic product like chatgpt without compensation or giving credit. They have essentially built an amazing product on the shoulders of lots of creators without them earning anything from it. Is that fair? I don’t think so. But that’s just me. This might be a bit irrelevant, but Github training their ai on repositories without consent or consideration of their license wasn’t cool either.
thatgerhard 3y ago
so humanity has to get access to less information because 1 guy's feelings got hurt for not being mentioned in a field where they were not the only contributor

41 points by webmaven 3y ago

AI will win. Just like Napster liberated music, AI will liberate knowledge. Only problem is those creating AI now. It's a silent arms race. Tempered by global interest rates. Who will win?

Etheryte 3y ago
I'm not entirely sure if I would agree with what you say about Napster. While for a while what you said was true, these days we're back to most people listening to music in walled gardens like Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
- brookst 3y ago
  The lesson of walled gardens is that people will pay for curation. That’s endlessly irritating to some people, but that doesn’t change the truth of it.
  - pwython 3y ago
    People will pay more for convenience. A music streaming service with access to millions of songs is the same price per month of what a single artist's CD was 20 years ago. Sure, you don't have a cool physical copy, but it's incredibly convenient to search for any song in seconds, play it instantly, and not worry about storage, etc.
    - wincy 3y ago
      And I don’t have to download it, copy it to my phone, make sure the mp3 metadata is correct for the song, and I can view the lyrics, and easily share the song with a friend, and make a playlist. I have a 50GB collection of MP3s on my desktop from my teens and 20s that have been collecting dust because I just use Spotify because it’s convenient.
- Levitz 3y ago
  Spotify was created in a market in which piracy was widespread. I'm not sure we can assume it would have ever been a thing otherwise.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  Spotify/Steam/Netflix only exist in the form they do because piracy is such a compelling alternative.
klabb3 3y ago
Napster was an opinionated (political even) piece of tech built for a specific purpose. AI is not like that. And even if ChatGPT currently gives you something nice, it’s not controlled by you and can be nerfed and extort you. You’d need to make an argument that AI will be good for people. It’s not self evident.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

nimski 3y ago

"The difference, when it comes to AI, is one of scale. ChatGPT can “read” more published words in a few seconds than I could in several lifetimes and, unlike me, that data isn’t immediately replaced in my human-limited short-term memory by whatever I’m thinking of next." I think this misses the point. The issue of scale isn't on the ingest side, it's on the output side. Once you train an LLM on a book (however long that takes), then the LLM can be the interface to that book for an unlimited number of users. That scales very differently to, say, a person reading a book and writing something influenced by it. In the case of the LLM, it's a complete interface to the contents of the book. It lets you "talk to the book". If that exists, why would anyone buy the book? If I could ask ChatGPT to "summarize the new book by XYZ", then spend an hour or two asking the questions _I_ have about the book from it, then buying the book would be a net negative. If we don't solve attribution (like BMI solved for music), then the financial upside of publishing might be majority-captured by whoever trains LLMs on the copyrighted material.

hnfong 3y ago
By your argument, writing summaries of books, "explain <book> in 3 minutes" youtube videos, and commentaries on books should be made illegal too. Or more precisely, they should be made illegal if and only if they achieve "scale" of maybe at least a couple million viewers. The fundamental premise of copyright is flawed. Taking medieval concepts involving censorship of the printing press and extending them to the 21st century is bound to produce awkward results. I'm not hopeful that copyrights will be reconsidered from the ground up during this AI shock, but at least we shouldn't pretend that any arguments about copyrights should be reasonable and make sense. I honestly believe a "realpolitik" approach is more helpful, at least we know that those with more political influence and spend more effort lobbying will probably "win" in the end...
- nimski 3y ago
  I appreciate the example, but here's where I think it differs as an analogy of what LLMs do: A summary doesn't have infinite or variable depth. If you read the summary of a non-fiction (I'll limit my argument to that, as another poster pointed out) book, and either aren't convinced, or want to learn more about the matter, you'd have to purchase the book. An LLM that has ben trained on the book, if somehow designed not to hallucinate, would be able to answer any question you have about the book at any depth, seamlessly blending in material from other books to answer a question or explain a concept. That seems like an entirely better experience than reading the book from start-to-finish. I don't see how the original can compete.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

This is personal for me, as I have a large dataset (near books3 sized) in my specialized domain that I tried to publish an NLP paper for. Excellent scores but I was too honest about the fact that some stuff in my evidence was gathered from paywalled sources. Despite excellent conference scores, the senior area chair intervened and they rejected the paper. Seems that the current copyright fights are having a chilling effect in the context of research on language resources and datasets. This is extremely sad. I expected the academic AI world to have a bit more institutional compassion for copyright abolitionism…

moffkalast 3y ago
Modern copyright law is so far behind the times and broken in more ways one can count. The only sensible way one can deal with it is to ignore it and keep their mouth shut. Say for example, the Mistral AI approach. The released Mistral 7B and destroyed every other model in its class in performance while giving it a much less restrictive license. They gave zero info about what they trained on... and nobody is asking. A very smart move from both sides that benefits just about everyone. The only winning move is not to play.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  I suspect they’re covered under fair use (for now) but also nobody cares because the larger models are the ones that get used by people who would care enough to be upset about it.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Everyone claims fair use, but the terms for that are pretty narrow and wouldn't hold up anywhere afaik. Unless you're doing a news report or a review with actual criticism it probably won't pass the smell test. An LLM definitely doesn't fit that description in the slightest.
    - ShamelessC 3y ago
      I maintain my position that despite whatever moral or ethical quandaries you feel are being violated, “no one cares”.

WalterBright 3y ago

If I read a book, adding its contents to my brain, and then having that content influence what I write on HN, is that a copyright violation?

Jensson 3y ago
If you say you are retelling the story and then are writing down the story chapter for chapter, yes. That is what LLMs can do, they don't write something inspired by it they write down a copy of it with switched out words and grammar structure. It doesn't matter if you personally aren't using them like that, the fact that they can be used like that is the problem.
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  >That is what LLMs can do, they don't write something inspired by it they write down a copy of it with switched out words and grammar structure. That's not at all what they do. This myth of "supercharged interpolation" really needs to die. https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09485 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09485 >It doesn't matter if you personally aren't using them like that, the fact that they can be used like that is the problem. Of course it matters. You penalize people when they have done something wrong not if they have the capacity to.
rafaelmn 3y ago
Let's not pretend copyright and intellectual property is somehow grounded in reality or logic. IP laws will have to get updated for generative AI - what that looks like will be determined by interest groups in play and legislators.
Alifatisk 3y ago
I’d say no because comparing a human brain to chatGPT isn’t really fair nor am I sure they work in identical way. chatGPT can and have spat out raw content it was trained on. You understand the words you read in a book, you get the message out of it and are able to resonate and have thoughts. ChatGPT doesn’t, it just scrambles words based on statistics. You, writing content based on your influence should not be counted as copyright violation in my opinion. But giving some credit isn’t a bad practice either. If you did copy and paste the contents of the book and call it yours, then that should be counted as copyright violation (there are probably exceptions to this). I think what some people are currently against is openai (closed ai) scraping all kinds of content on the web and build a fantastic product like chatgpt without compensation or giving credit. They have essentially built an amazing product on the shoulders of lots of creators without them earning anything from it. Is that fair? I don’t think so. But that’s just me. This might be a bit irrelevant, but Github training their ai on repositories without consent or consideration of their license wasn’t cool either.

thatgerhard 3y ago

so humanity has to get access to less information because 1 guy's feelings got hurt for not being mentioned in a field where they were not the only contributor