4 ms·

I still don't understand how they can keep a straight face claiming that training on all human-written material (copyrighted or not) that can be found on the In

I still don't understand how they can keep a straight face claiming that training on all human-written material (copyrighted or not) that can be found on the Internet is perfectly fine, but training on ChatGPT output is not (or in other words, that human writers cannot have a choice on whether their output is used, but bot owners can).

Espressosaurus 3y ago
Easily. Pulling up the ladder behind you is classic self-interested, antisocial behavior. It doesn't have to be internally consistent, it just has to make them money.
- falcor84 3y ago
  Indeed. Setting up "Barriers to entry" is one of the fundamental things taught on an MBA.
- jomohke 3y ago
  To be fair, this isn't a ladder OpenAI used themselves, right? (The seemingly-extreme shortcut of training from an external LLM model) Their ladder (using public data, and hiring humans to classify to taste) is still available I believe.
  - matwood 3y ago
    > Their ladder (using public data, and hiring humans to classify) is still available I believe. Not really. Once chatGPT came out, many sites changed their terms and/or significantly increased their API access costs to prevent/limit/make cost prohibitive future scraping.
    - jomohke 3y ago
      Good point. Though that affects OpenAI too for new data. I had assumed most of their web content was from Common Crawl, and the older pre-ChatGPT Common Crawl datasets used would still be available. But it looks like Twitter, for one, was not in Common Crawl.
    - nonethewiser 3y ago
      > Once chatGPT came out, many sites changed their terms Which is not openAI “pulling up the ladder behind them”
      - lelanthran 3y ago
        No, it is them spoiling the pitch. There is literally no way for them to avoid looking like assholes once they take enact barriers that they themselves did not have to overcome.
        richardw 3y ago
        It’s not like OpenAI trained their model using someone else’s and now won’t allow it done to them. This seems more like saying “get your own content and do the work like everyone else”.
        withinboredom 3y ago
        Except they made it nearly impossible to do so.
  - moogly 3y ago
    > using public data As far as we know.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > Pulling up the ladder behind you is classic self-interested, antisocial behavior. Not the case. That would be the case if OpenAI prevented them from using the same resources, which ChatGPT is not.
  - k__ 3y ago
    Fair. To keep that analogy going, they essentially used the ladder so hard, it broke.
  - latexr 3y ago
    > if OpenAI prevented them from using the same resources, which ChatGPT is not. It kind of is. Just think of how many services changed their data sharing policies and closed APIs due to ChatGPT training (Twitter, Stack Overflow, Reddit). Maybe the analogy is that instead of pulling the ladder, they set fire to it so it’s burning and making it harder for others to climb. Even if they didn’t set it alight on purpose, I don’t imagine they’re losing sleep over it.
- tinus_hn 3y ago
  Does Bytedance allow OpenAI to train ChatGPT using TikTok?
kdwikzncba 3y ago
Google does the same. It wants the pages that it indexes to be original; if a page just copy pastes another page's content, its score is affected negatively or even de-indexed, they call it spam. Google itself on the other hand does just this, for example Wikipedia text and lyrics are taken from other pages and copy pasted onto Google's page. Try telling a "googler" this and theyll go "noooo but for Google it's different because Google has determined that's optimal and good for user experience". It's difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  I generally don't get many results pointing to google search results, so I guess google search ranks pretty low.
  - fho 3y ago
    It's about those "information blocks" next to the search results that are often copied verbatim from Wikipedia or Stack Overflow
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
  These may have been more valid criticisms in the past, but today, Google does indeed pay for both Wikipedia content and song lyric licensing: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/22/23178245/google-paying-wikimedia-foundation-information https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/22/23178245/google-paying-wi... https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18684211/google-song-lyrics-dispute-genius-media-lyricfind-search-results https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18684211/google-song-lyri...
  - kdwikzncba 3y ago
    So? I didn't say they don't pay. What I said is if I copy paste things into my page, Google will kill it because it's spam. If I say "but what I'm actually paying for this content"... That's irrelevant. I'm not saying that Google is stealing content, I'm saying they're hypocritical is applying and argument when the conclusions benefit them, but not otherwise.
kenjackson 3y ago
I dont think they are making a legal statement, but just doing a business maneuver. Something could be perfectly legal, but just against company policy.
saiya-jin 3y ago
In same way say Putin can spew all that fantasy bullshit over and over to Russian population which doesn't make any sense even at glance. And most folks back there do know it to certain extent, yet he keeps up the show and whole power dance instead of simply stating the truth that he is the current dictator and the rest can bow down and suck it up. Same with most if not all other dictators. Not equalizing those two situations at all, just pointing out that dynamics of communication between normal people don't really happen in many other situations, or if they do its just a shallow charade. Or... just don't expect fairness and good behavior when tons of money, power and legacies are at stake.
austhrow743 3y ago
Have they complained after getting their Amazon Unlimited account disabled or something like that?
visarga 3y ago
Just like Google is crawling the whole internet (hitting your server a million times a day) and then, with a straight face, will plug a captcha in your face if you dare search more than 3 times with a quoted string or non-trivial terms. Forget about doing a few million searches to bootstrap your dataset, Google was always hostile - both in access controls and pricing. You want results past 100 or 1000 mark? never possible, not even 20 years ago. But they say 1 bazzilion web pages in their index match your search. tl;dr Google crawls you, you can't crawl Google. How is that fair? They built their empire on our brain outputs but won't share theirs.
- LadyCailin 3y ago
  Google respects robots.txt though, which is more then they need to. If you put data out in public, what do you expect? If you don’t like Google crawling you though, just restrict them. That’s usually to your own detriment though, but I won’t judge you if you’re into self-flagellation. Just don’t think you’re holier than me because you are.
  - visarga 3y ago
    It's ok, the wheel is turning and now reality has come to bite them in the ass. CommonCrawl supplied the text and LLMs replace their index, for a large number of requests. A new crop of search engines like phind.com and perplexity.ai have better than Google results.
- richardw 3y ago
  My memory of the early ish days is that Facebook heavily leveraged Google contacts (which was allowed by Google) to discover friends, and then blocked others from doing the same. Is that correct or can someone offer better info?
d4mi3n 3y ago
They certainly don't have the moral high ground, but in any other context this is usually considered an inference attack--sampling a model somebody else spent a lot of money to train in order to build a similar one at a much reduced training cost. So while OpenAI is absolutely lacks the moral high-ground, ByteDance still seems to be engaging in adversarial behavior.
FridgeSeal 3y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy
sanbor 3y ago
Google is useful thanks to websites letting Google to crawl them. But Google doesn’t allow to be crawl.
bitcharmer 3y ago
Ask Sam, HN's darling.
- corethree 3y ago
  You know he got fired from Y-combinator right? It was a direct order from Paul Graham. He keeps mum about it but I have trusted sources who know the truth. Additionally, it's sort of public knowledge: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-altman-fired-y-combinator-paul-graham/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-alt... I don't have a full view into exactly why he was fired from both OpenAI and Y-combinator. But from what I hear the reasoning is a bit similar. Sam Altman is a bit of a political snake. He lacks ethics and he's not honest either. The last part is just me speculating on a lot of the anecdotes from quips I've heard over the years from people who know Sam. Sams public persona is very different. And I think a lot of HN viewers worship that public persona. But Sam being a darling of the HN and Ycombinator themselves? No way. They fired him so it's unlikely.
  - bitcharmer 3y ago
    I never said anything about Y Combinator. Only that recently HN felt like Sam Altman's circle jerk. It was surreal to read some comments praising him.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Ye it was really strange. And the simultaneous "outrage" on some Twitter users. The praise felt very artificial. But the drama was real.
    - mi_lk 3y ago
      the overwhelming support of him across HN/Twitter (circle jerk) really rubs me the wrong way and I just can't take Sam Altman seriously anymore
    - corethree 3y ago
      You know HN is ycombinator right? That when you come to this site you have to type in the words ycombinator for the url right? You said Sam is HNs darling. That's different from saying HN viewers. So you literally did not say what you said here.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
I don't see any problem here. Their TOS to access the service is their right. Unless they used bot to accept TOS of some other site, scraping is completely legal. Also breaking OpenAI's TOS is likely completely legal and everyone I know is collecting data to their own model. Worst they could do is ban the account.
T-A 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation
- FridgeSeal 3y ago
  I was on my phone when I clicked this, so the full link was obscured, and while loading I totally expected the page to be “hypocrisy”.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Just so I understand the argument, OpenAI would be claiming that anyone using their model outputs to distill i.e. train a smaller model on their model is a violation of copyright, but them training on the entirety of the internet (including copyrighted material) is not a violation?
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    > OpenAI would be claiming that anyone using their model outputs to distill i.e. train a smaller model on their model is a violation of copyright OpenAI haven’t claimed this. They are refusing to generate new data for ByteDance by suspending their account.
JimDabell 3y ago
It’s pretty simple and not hypocritical to hold these two positions simultaneously: - It’s legal and moral to train on data you have access to, regardless of copyright. - Nobody is obligated to provide services to you so you can obtain that data from them. It would be hypocritical if, say, ByteDance obtained synthetic data generated from GPT-4 and then OpenAI tried to prevent them from training on the data they already obtained. But all they are doing at the moment is temporarily pausing generating new data for them. OpenAI aren’t obligated to do this and OpenAI have never argued that other people are obligated to do it for them. So no hypocrisy.
- jamesrom 3y ago
  However, it might be a tad hypocritical to name your company "OpenAI" in such arrangements.
  - marcus0x62 3y ago
    Well, they are open for business, so...
tinus_hn 3y ago
It’s like company A collects everyone’s phone number and then publishes it as a phone book. And then company B copies the phone book and publishes it as their own. It’s not a straightforward copyright issue but in many jurisdictions that is not allowed. Company A did the work, they should be allowed to profit.
- ghaff 3y ago
  In the US, company B would probably be in the clear--at least for the list of names and numbers. You don't necessarily get copyright protection just because something was a lot of work ("sweat of the brow"). The most relevant US Supreme Court case is Feist.
  - tinus_hn 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right There is protection in a few notable jurisdictions so a violation would make the product illegal in those jurisdictions, which is a problem if it’s an online product.
doikor 3y ago
The work on the internet is on the internet freely available to all and the output of their API is the output of their API only available after registration and agreeing to their terms and conditions. OpenAI are free to block anyone from using their API if they want. Just like anyone hosting their content a website is free to block the OpenAI web crawler.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Espressosaurus 3y ago

Easily. Pulling up the ladder behind you is classic self-interested, antisocial behavior. It doesn't have to be internally consistent, it just has to make them money.

falcor84 3y ago
Indeed. Setting up "Barriers to entry" is one of the fundamental things taught on an MBA.
jomohke 3y ago
To be fair, this isn't a ladder OpenAI used themselves, right? (The seemingly-extreme shortcut of training from an external LLM model) Their ladder (using public data, and hiring humans to classify to taste) is still available I believe.
- matwood 3y ago
  > Their ladder (using public data, and hiring humans to classify) is still available I believe. Not really. Once chatGPT came out, many sites changed their terms and/or significantly increased their API access costs to prevent/limit/make cost prohibitive future scraping.
  - jomohke 3y ago
    Good point. Though that affects OpenAI too for new data. I had assumed most of their web content was from Common Crawl, and the older pre-ChatGPT Common Crawl datasets used would still be available. But it looks like Twitter, for one, was not in Common Crawl.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    > Once chatGPT came out, many sites changed their terms Which is not openAI “pulling up the ladder behind them”
    - lelanthran 3y ago
      No, it is them spoiling the pitch. There is literally no way for them to avoid looking like assholes once they take enact barriers that they themselves did not have to overcome.
      - richardw 3y ago
        It’s not like OpenAI trained their model using someone else’s and now won’t allow it done to them. This seems more like saying “get your own content and do the work like everyone else”.
        withinboredom 3y ago
        Except they made it nearly impossible to do so.
- moogly 3y ago
  > using public data As far as we know.
nonethewiser 3y ago
> Pulling up the ladder behind you is classic self-interested, antisocial behavior. Not the case. That would be the case if OpenAI prevented them from using the same resources, which ChatGPT is not.
- k__ 3y ago
  Fair. To keep that analogy going, they essentially used the ladder so hard, it broke.
- latexr 3y ago
  > if OpenAI prevented them from using the same resources, which ChatGPT is not. It kind of is. Just think of how many services changed their data sharing policies and closed APIs due to ChatGPT training (Twitter, Stack Overflow, Reddit). Maybe the analogy is that instead of pulling the ladder, they set fire to it so it’s burning and making it harder for others to climb. Even if they didn’t set it alight on purpose, I don’t imagine they’re losing sleep over it.
tinus_hn 3y ago
Does Bytedance allow OpenAI to train ChatGPT using TikTok?

kdwikzncba 3y ago

Google does the same. It wants the pages that it indexes to be original; if a page just copy pastes another page's content, its score is affected negatively or even de-indexed, they call it spam. Google itself on the other hand does just this, for example Wikipedia text and lyrics are taken from other pages and copy pasted onto Google's page. Try telling a "googler" this and theyll go "noooo but for Google it's different because Google has determined that's optimal and good for user experience". It's difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.

wodenokoto 3y ago
I generally don't get many results pointing to google search results, so I guess google search ranks pretty low.
- fho 3y ago
  It's about those "information blocks" next to the search results that are often copied verbatim from Wikipedia or Stack Overflow
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
These may have been more valid criticisms in the past, but today, Google does indeed pay for both Wikipedia content and song lyric licensing: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/22/23178245/google-paying-wikimedia-foundation-information https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/22/23178245/google-paying-wi... https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18684211/google-song-lyrics-dispute-genius-media-lyricfind-search-results https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18684211/google-song-lyri...
- kdwikzncba 3y ago
  So? I didn't say they don't pay. What I said is if I copy paste things into my page, Google will kill it because it's spam. If I say "but what I'm actually paying for this content"... That's irrelevant. I'm not saying that Google is stealing content, I'm saying they're hypocritical is applying and argument when the conclusions benefit them, but not otherwise.

kenjackson 3y ago

I dont think they are making a legal statement, but just doing a business maneuver. Something could be perfectly legal, but just against company policy.

saiya-jin 3y ago

In same way say Putin can spew all that fantasy bullshit over and over to Russian population which doesn't make any sense even at glance. And most folks back there do know it to certain extent, yet he keeps up the show and whole power dance instead of simply stating the truth that he is the current dictator and the rest can bow down and suck it up. Same with most if not all other dictators. Not equalizing those two situations at all, just pointing out that dynamics of communication between normal people don't really happen in many other situations, or if they do its just a shallow charade. Or... just don't expect fairness and good behavior when tons of money, power and legacies are at stake.

austhrow743 3y ago

Have they complained after getting their Amazon Unlimited account disabled or something like that?

visarga 3y ago

Just like Google is crawling the whole internet (hitting your server a million times a day) and then, with a straight face, will plug a captcha in your face if you dare search more than 3 times with a quoted string or non-trivial terms. Forget about doing a few million searches to bootstrap your dataset, Google was always hostile - both in access controls and pricing. You want results past 100 or 1000 mark? never possible, not even 20 years ago. But they say 1 bazzilion web pages in their index match your search. tl;dr Google crawls you, you can't crawl Google. How is that fair? They built their empire on our brain outputs but won't share theirs.

LadyCailin 3y ago
Google respects robots.txt though, which is more then they need to. If you put data out in public, what do you expect? If you don’t like Google crawling you though, just restrict them. That’s usually to your own detriment though, but I won’t judge you if you’re into self-flagellation. Just don’t think you’re holier than me because you are.
- visarga 3y ago
  It's ok, the wheel is turning and now reality has come to bite them in the ass. CommonCrawl supplied the text and LLMs replace their index, for a large number of requests. A new crop of search engines like phind.com and perplexity.ai have better than Google results.
richardw 3y ago
My memory of the early ish days is that Facebook heavily leveraged Google contacts (which was allowed by Google) to discover friends, and then blocked others from doing the same. Is that correct or can someone offer better info?

d4mi3n 3y ago

They certainly don't have the moral high ground, but in any other context this is usually considered an inference attack--sampling a model somebody else spent a lot of money to train in order to build a similar one at a much reduced training cost. So while OpenAI is absolutely lacks the moral high-ground, ByteDance still seems to be engaging in adversarial behavior.

FridgeSeal 3y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy

sanbor 3y ago

Google is useful thanks to websites letting Google to crawl them. But Google doesn’t allow to be crawl.

bitcharmer 3y ago

Ask Sam, HN's darling.

corethree 3y ago
You know he got fired from Y-combinator right? It was a direct order from Paul Graham. He keeps mum about it but I have trusted sources who know the truth. Additionally, it's sort of public knowledge: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-altman-fired-y-combinator-paul-graham/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-alt... I don't have a full view into exactly why he was fired from both OpenAI and Y-combinator. But from what I hear the reasoning is a bit similar. Sam Altman is a bit of a political snake. He lacks ethics and he's not honest either. The last part is just me speculating on a lot of the anecdotes from quips I've heard over the years from people who know Sam. Sams public persona is very different. And I think a lot of HN viewers worship that public persona. But Sam being a darling of the HN and Ycombinator themselves? No way. They fired him so it's unlikely.
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  I never said anything about Y Combinator. Only that recently HN felt like Sam Altman's circle jerk. It was surreal to read some comments praising him.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Ye it was really strange. And the simultaneous "outrage" on some Twitter users. The praise felt very artificial. But the drama was real.
  - mi_lk 3y ago
    the overwhelming support of him across HN/Twitter (circle jerk) really rubs me the wrong way and I just can't take Sam Altman seriously anymore
  - corethree 3y ago
    You know HN is ycombinator right? That when you come to this site you have to type in the words ycombinator for the url right? You said Sam is HNs darling. That's different from saying HN viewers. So you literally did not say what you said here.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

I don't see any problem here. Their TOS to access the service is their right. Unless they used bot to accept TOS of some other site, scraping is completely legal. Also breaking OpenAI's TOS is likely completely legal and everyone I know is collecting data to their own model. Worst they could do is ban the account.

T-A 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation

FridgeSeal 3y ago
I was on my phone when I clicked this, so the full link was obscured, and while loading I totally expected the page to be “hypocrisy”.
janalsncm 3y ago
Just so I understand the argument, OpenAI would be claiming that anyone using their model outputs to distill i.e. train a smaller model on their model is a violation of copyright, but them training on the entirety of the internet (including copyrighted material) is not a violation?
- JimDabell 3y ago
  > OpenAI would be claiming that anyone using their model outputs to distill i.e. train a smaller model on their model is a violation of copyright OpenAI haven’t claimed this. They are refusing to generate new data for ByteDance by suspending their account.

JimDabell 3y ago

It’s pretty simple and not hypocritical to hold these two positions simultaneously: - It’s legal and moral to train on data you have access to, regardless of copyright. - Nobody is obligated to provide services to you so you can obtain that data from them. It would be hypocritical if, say, ByteDance obtained synthetic data generated from GPT-4 and then OpenAI tried to prevent them from training on the data they already obtained. But all they are doing at the moment is temporarily pausing generating new data for them. OpenAI aren’t obligated to do this and OpenAI have never argued that other people are obligated to do it for them. So no hypocrisy.

jamesrom 3y ago
However, it might be a tad hypocritical to name your company "OpenAI" in such arrangements.
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  Well, they are open for business, so...

tinus_hn 3y ago

It’s like company A collects everyone’s phone number and then publishes it as a phone book. And then company B copies the phone book and publishes it as their own. It’s not a straightforward copyright issue but in many jurisdictions that is not allowed. Company A did the work, they should be allowed to profit.

ghaff 3y ago
In the US, company B would probably be in the clear--at least for the list of names and numbers. You don't necessarily get copyright protection just because something was a lot of work ("sweat of the brow"). The most relevant US Supreme Court case is Feist.
- tinus_hn 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right There is protection in a few notable jurisdictions so a violation would make the product illegal in those jurisdictions, which is a problem if it’s an online product.

doikor 3y ago

The work on the internet is on the internet freely available to all and the output of their API is the output of their API only available after registration and agreeing to their terms and conditions. OpenAI are free to block anyone from using their API if they want. Just like anyone hosting their content a website is free to block the OpenAI web crawler.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]