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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.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      Yeah, but they wont get non-public data that way. I'd bet they did get access to a lot of non-public data just by asking and stating they do it for a non-profit mission.
layer8 3y ago
That shouldn’t matter, regarding copyright violation. Purchasing a book only makes the physical object your own, it doesn’t change anything with regard to the contained work.
throwup238 3y ago
Did Google Books? What if they just bought dirt cheap used copies meaning the creators saw nothing thanks to the first sale doctrine?
- ghaff 3y ago
  >What if they just bought dirt cheap used copies meaning the creators saw nothing thanks to the first sale doctrine? They could without question set up a very nice physical library in Mountain View and even invite the public in. They can probably in general scan those books for their own internal use. What got shut down was scanning the books and making them available to everyone in their entirety.
smegger001 3y ago
Why should that matter? I have read many borrowed books for free, and can quote many of them. We have huge institutions devoted to letting people borrow read and learn from books they are called libraries or archives.
- jamincan 3y ago
  I've heard this argument before, but I think it's pretty clear that humans and machines are not equal before the law and the fact that you have the right to make a derivative work doesn't necessarily mean that you can make a machine to do that for you.

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.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Yeah, but they wont get non-public data that way. I'd bet they did get access to a lot of non-public data just by asking and stating they do it for a non-profit mission.

layer8 3y ago

That shouldn’t matter, regarding copyright violation. Purchasing a book only makes the physical object your own, it doesn’t change anything with regard to the contained work.

throwup238 3y ago

Did Google Books? What if they just bought dirt cheap used copies meaning the creators saw nothing thanks to the first sale doctrine?

ghaff 3y ago
>What if they just bought dirt cheap used copies meaning the creators saw nothing thanks to the first sale doctrine? They could without question set up a very nice physical library in Mountain View and even invite the public in. They can probably in general scan those books for their own internal use. What got shut down was scanning the books and making them available to everyone in their entirety.

smegger001 3y ago

Why should that matter? I have read many borrowed books for free, and can quote many of them. We have huge institutions devoted to letting people borrow read and learn from books they are called libraries or archives.

jamincan 3y ago
I've heard this argument before, but I think it's pretty clear that humans and machines are not equal before the law and the fact that you have the right to make a derivative work doesn't necessarily mean that you can make a machine to do that for you.