10 ms·

Isn't it a bit hypocritical of them to use other people's copyrighted work or "output" they weren't given license/permission to use, but deny people the same op

• muzani 3y ago
  Yes, but the original intent was to help other companies create ethical AI models. If they've already turned their back on those core values, a bit more hypocrisy won't stop them.
  • fiips 3y ago
    Stated intent and actual intent are usually different, I expect they intended the opposite all along but were just riding the open source ethical AI wave to profit.
    • omeze 3y ago
      Ive talked to a few people formerly at OpenAI a few years ago - the deviation from the original mission was a “boiling frog” process that is best demarcated when the Anthropic founders left. The core team doing the actual science and engineering work did legitimately believe in the open research mission. But when funding was hard to find, things kind of broke.
    • muzani 3y ago
      I strongly doubt it. Sam was pretty damn rich before OpenAI. He's written a lot of stuff about AI and how he worried someone would do it. The original plan was roughly build the basis for ethical AI, have someone else build on top of it, which somehow pivoted into everyone using their API. If they just wanted money, they could have cut out a lot of the ethical filters and choke out competitors. Google didn't stop NSFW. Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, etc didn't. AI is bound to be used for NSFW among other things, but they've set the standards to make it ethical. I think eventually they did let loose to try to keep ahead of competitors. This probably pissed off the board and led to the drama recently? Just speculation. Because the new models are nowhere near as anal as the initial release.
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        > If they just wanted money, they could have cut out a lot of the ethical filters and choke out competitors. I think you are wrong here, the safety filters (“safety” and “ethics” for AI are labels for boundaries and concerns of different ideological factions, and Altman and OpenAI are deep in the “safety” side—which has the nost money and power behind it so “safety” is also becoming the generic term for AI boundaries) are an important oart if the PR and regulatory lobbying effort, which is key to OpenAI’s long term moneymaking plan, given the absence of a durable moat for commercial AI. > If they just wanted money, they could have cut out a lot of the ethical filters and choke out competitors. Google didn't stop NSFW. Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, etc didn't. Neither, in practice, has OpenAI—there are whole communitids built around using OpenAI's models for very, very NSFW purposes. They've prevented casual NSFW, to oresent the image they want to thr government and interest grouoa whose support they want as they lovby to shape regulation of AI. avoiding being a target for things like the 404 Media campaign against CivitAI where the NSFW is more readily visible.
• draw_down 3y ago
  [dead]
• zzzeek 3y ago
  well nothing is "hypocritical" in the Ayn Randian world of "I have the marbles so now you pay me"
• bilekas 3y ago
  > they weren't given license/permission to use Do we know what data was used? And what the constraints were around it? Do we know it was used without permission or are we just jumping in the “ai bad” bandwagon?
  • ChatGTP 3y ago
    No, but their products regurgitate copyrighted material so I guess they either come clean about the data they used or we have to assume they stole it.
    • jameshart 3y ago
      I can quote the entire script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail - would you assume I stole it?
      • notahacker 3y ago
        No, but then as you're (presumably) a person rather than an information retrieval system you would be legally responsible for ensuring you had performance rights and paid royalties if you were quoting that script as part of a commercial service. That responsibility rests with you, not whoever gave you access to the film Conversely, photocopiers and text-to-speech engines and LLMs don't exercise choice over whether they reproduce copyrighted material and so can't be held responsible, so responsibility for clearing rights to redistribute/transform in that format clearly lies with the people inputting the copyrighted material. Obviously, OpenAI has tended to avoid making any attempts to secure those rights whatsoever
        • jameshart 3y ago
          Most libraries have photocopiers for their patrons to use. It’s their patrons’ responsibility to determine if any copying they do is permissible under fair or personal use rules. The library doesn’t know what you’re planning on doing with the information they shared with you.
• withinboredom 3y ago
  The fun thing is, is that IIRC, AI outputs aren’t copyrighted so this is actually more ethical that’s what OpenAI did. The only thing is that it was probably against the terms of service.
  • scarmig 3y ago
    Should have read the small print.
    • jamesholden 3y ago
      The irony. AI would help with that too! :D
    • dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
      I asked ChatGPT and it said it was fine.
  • chii 3y ago
    > aren’t copyrighted so this is actually more ethical that’s what OpenAI did why is that? all works, as long as it is "original" should be granted copyright. It should belong to the person who made it (in this case, the user, not openAI).
    • soulofmischief 3y ago
      What if the AI is fully autonomous, pays its own hosting bill etc? Who gets the copyright?
      • layer8 3y ago
        No one, because according to current legislation, copyright only applies to works by humans.
        • dboreham 3y ago
          Obvious new business model providing a human shill service where you look at AI output and say "yep, I made that". Now it's copyright, assigned to the customer of your startup.
• siva7 3y ago
  Nope. OpenAI is bearing all the associated legal risk, not ByteDance.
• j-a-a-p 3y ago
  I have yet not seen a definite conclusion that training a model equals breaching intellectual property rights. There is always the right of citation, and as long as the model is not producing copies of copyrighted material: where then is the violation? IP rights do not per se give the author an absolute right to determine how their work is used. It does give rights to prevent a reproduction, but that is not what an AI model does.
  • drawfloat 3y ago
    But did they purchase every non public domain book they used? Highly doubt it.
    • j-a-a-p 3y ago
      I agree, also my thought, but that is a principally different case then requiring consent from the author. That suggests that OpenAI would have downloaded pirated material, or hacked paywalls, how did they get this material? BTW I noticed that GPT-4 is good at writing legal letters of the sort that is widely available online. But a subpoena, ('dagvaarding', the Dutch version I have researched) it completely fails to create. Also there are not many subpoenas available online, and the court (in the Netherlands) only publishes the verdicts, not the other documents. Lawyers OTOH have a lot more of this available in their libraries. So, my impression is that there is still a lot of material out there that is not in the corpus.
      • Jensson 3y ago
        > how did they get this material? "Hello, we are a non-profit that wants to make AI models to benefit humanity. Can you give us access to your data to help us in our work?"
        • jdiff 3y ago
          This is not what they did. They fed off enormous databases of pirated material.
• dghddgd 3y ago
  Bytedance violated the contractual arrangement. That’s not the same thing as general copyright.
• pluc 3y ago
  Yes, but we're doing the same thing with industrialization. The US is past the stage of factories so we'll deny everyone else factories because we deem them too pollutant now.
  • llamaimperative 3y ago
    Not really and I’m suspicious you know these are not directly analogous. We’re not trying to curb emissions for the purpose of kneecapping other economies. Short of China, we don’t really have any incentive to do that (bigger markets = better under US industrial policy [contradictory opinions from left wing undergrad students on Twitter don’t count as “US industrial policy”]). What’s actually happening is that we caused a problem and now it’s getting worse and in order to fix it we need to not allow everyone else to continue it. This is a novel and advanced philosophical argument called, “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
    • flir 3y ago
      It could be seen as a non-trade tariff barrier if you squint quite hard. There's another example - intellectual property. The US was fine playing fast and loose with IP (Most famous example is Dickens' attempts to point out he was being pirated left and right in the States and not seeing a penny: https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/copyright1842.html https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/copyright1842.html) Now America is on top of the IP pile, it sees other nations as playing fast and loose: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2013/04/08/indias-solution-to-drug-costs-ignore-patents-and-control-prices-except-for-home-grown-drugs/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2013/04/08/indias...
      • llamaimperative 3y ago
        Huh I wonder if there have been any substantial changes to international cooperation, investments made thereupon, and agreements made thereupon between the 1850s and 2013. Countries don’t have to join international trade regimes. They also don’t have to join climate/emission commitments. They do both of them because they come with benefits. Cursory searching suggests the first real work on international copyright, by contrast, came about in 1886. Even early versions came after Dickens’ story here.
• lupusreal 3y ago
  Since when have corporations ever been ashamed of hypocrisy? Corporations can't feel shame about anything.
• pimpampum 3y ago
  There's a saying, "thief who steals from a thief has a hundred years of forgiveness".
• baryphonic 3y ago
  My guess is that using the OpenAI models to generate training data for a bespoke transformer model is extremely taxing on OpenAI's computing usage. If I were to guess, that is why that behavior is proscribed by the TOS, and why ByteDance was banned. Probably has nothing to do with the ethics of how training data is gathered.
• xianshou 3y ago
  Morality and legality aside, there's a substantive difference between use of content and use of a model. Pretraining a GPT 4-class model from raw data requires trillions of tokens and millions of dollars in compute, whereas distilling a model using GPT 4's output requires orders of magnitude less data. Add to that the fact that OpenAI is probably subsidizing compute at their current per-token cost, and it's clearly unsustainable. The morality of training on internet-scale text data is another discussion, but I would point out that this has been standard practice since the advent of the internet, both for training smaller models and for fueling large tech companies such as Google. Broadly speaking, there is nothing wrong with mere consumption. What gets both morally and legally more complex is production - how much are you allowed to synthesize from the training data? And that is a fair question.
  • x86x87 3y ago
    The effort and resources required to train from raw data are nothing compared to the effort and resources that went into producing the "training" input. How much dors it cost to produce all the things they scrapped from the internet? So morally they are in the wrong - I don't care if it's standard practice since "the beginning of the internet" or not.
    • addicted 3y ago
      It’s also not standard practice since the beginning of the internet. Referencing original input through links is almost foundational to the internet (at least the original internet). In fact, the power of linking to data sources is what Google is almost entirely built upon.
  • wgj 3y ago
    > Pretraining a GPT 4-class model from raw data requires trillions of tokens and millions of dollars in compute, And millions of documents authored by people that weren't compensated. The difference is consolidating all of that value into a single company.
    • smegger001 3y ago
• superduty 3y ago
  Yes
• antisthenes 3y ago
  > I'm genuinely wondering how this is different from them using others work without consent, but IANAL so maybe I'm just confusing mortality and legality When it comes to cutting edge business vs business decisions, the legality is often defined post-factum, e.g. in courts. For an outsider to know whether something in a case like this is legal or not is near impossible, considering how opaque such businesses are.
• poulpy123 3y ago
  it's not a bit hypocritical, it's extremely hypocritical