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The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement
- Sateeshm 3y agoI posted this a few months ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381399 Piracy at scale
- thejackgoode 3y ago[flagged]
- pm90 3y agoNYT article with a lot more context https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-microsoft-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t...
- solardev 3y agoBut what's the ChatGPT summary, in an expressive style that closely mimics a reader's personal relationship to the Times?
- AbrahamParangi 3y agoDoes it not seem a bit suspect to read the the NYT reporting on their own lawsuit?
- DreaminDani 3y agoThe newsroom is a different part of thr company than the legal department. Plus, sometimes your company does something that's newsworthy! Just like all journalism, there's always implicit bias. No reason to get suspicious about a news organization covering the news.
- AbrahamParangi 3y agoIf Apple is in a lawsuit I'm not going to go to the Apple media relations page for the story. What about the NYT, also a for-profit company, makes it more principled than Apple, other than that they say they are?
- muglug 3y agoThe NY Times company has an analogue to the Apple media relations page: https://investors.nytco.com/news-and-events/press-releases/ https://investors.nytco.com/news-and-events/press-releases/ In most respected media companies there is a really-important-to-journalists-who-work-there firewall between these sorts of corporate battles and the reporting on them.
- travoc 3y agoReading an article where you assume the author is biased is not so bad. What’s bad is finding an alternative source and reading it as if the author IS unbiased.
- solardev 3y agoThe NYT also hallucinates from time to time: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the-record-times-reporter-who-resigned-leaves-long-trail-of-deception.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the-record-... (That's a story about Jayson Blair, one of their reporters who just plain made up stories and sources for months before getting caught) Edit: Sheesh, even their apology is paywalled. Wiki background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair?wprov=sfla1
- noitpmeder 3y agoOne should always source news from a variety of outlets as to attempt to be cognizant of the biases in play and to see the story from many viewpoints. Would I trust the NYT to be unbiased? No. But is their viewpoint extremely relevant to the subject at hand? Yes.
- pama 3y ago[edit: they have since opened a comment section to the article.] It is unfortunate that the NYTimes don’t allow reader comments to this article. I like some of the NYTimes content, but in this case use of chatGPT is infinitely more valuable to me than subscribing to the NYTimes, so I would like to explain this concept and the associated risks by their litigation without cancelling my subscription. Maybe it is time to move training of models to Japan that has explicitly adapted AI friendly legislation that allows training on previously copyrighted materials. My best guess is that if the inputs were legally obtained, then the output doesn’t violate anything until someone publishes it. Similar to how reading a newspaper in a public library is legal but copying its content verbatim and republishing is not.
- jprete 3y agoThe ChatGPT subscription is more valuable because it's built on the theft of the NYT content and many other authors' work.
- pama 3y agoNo. It is a technology that can massively accelerate human progress—I don’t buy the theory that OpenAI used NYTimes content that was not freely available to them. If you read all of the public internet you probably have lots of snippets of NYTimes articles. Regarding the reading of the wirecutter by a browser tool, I don’t know how much of it is available online without subscription (because I subscribe to the NYTimes), but arguably if it is available I’d expect a helpful AI to read it and other sources and give me a short recommendation for what I look for (and not the ads or sponsored links).
- wg0 3y ago"Thank you. This article will be another labeled row in the next quarterly training batch. Now you can give our model a prompt to generate press coverage of any court case and it'll generate surpassing all the automated journalistic benchmarks that we have in place towards a safe, responsible, inclusive and aligned AI"
- batch12 3y ago> The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over claims the companies built their AI models by “copying and using millions” of the publication’s articles and now “directly compete” with the outlet’s content. Millions? Damn, they can churn out some content. 13 million[0]!. [0] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/nytarchive.html#:~:text=1851%E2%80%93PRESENT,than%2013%20million%20articles%20total https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter....
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- pavlov 3y agoThe NYT publishes about 200 pieces of journalism every day (according to their own website), and it was founded in 1851. That makes for a lot of articles.
- engineer_22 3y ago(2023 - 1851) * 365 * 200 = 12,556,000 Yep, so a few million ripped off articles is plausible.
- zozbot234 3y agoEverything from 1851 to 1927 ought to be in the public domain, though. If the goal of training an AI is just "to mimic a style" there are absolutely humongous amounts of text that's totally free of any copyright restrictions.
- hnarn 3y agoYes, there is large amounts of public domain text available, but does anyone believe this is a restriction that was imposed when feeding the models?
- midasuni 3y agoThe first 75+ years are no longer in copyright, so certainly possible to train on thousands maybe millions of NYT articles without concern.
- fallingknife 3y agoWhat are they arguing here? AFAIK reading copyrighted works is not copyright infringement. Copying and selling them is, as the name would suggest, but OpenAI absolutely did not do that. Are they trying to say that LLM training is a special type of reading that should be considered infringement? Seems like a weak case to me. edit: Would be very funny if OpenAI used an educational fair use defense
- NN88 3y ago>AFAIK reading copyrighted works I hope you don’t think that’s all whats happening, right? >LLM training is a special type of reading that should be considered infringement OK, what turn of phrase would you prefer?
- fallingknife 3y agoYou could definitely argue that it's more than just reading since they made the model out of it. But the matrix of parameters generated by training is so fundamentally different than the input that it is certainly covered by the transformative use exception to copyright.
- Ringz 3y agoOf course, OpenAI doesn't just read. But do they simply reproduce content verbatim? And when they do not reproduce contents of the NYT verbatim, but rather process and tailor them to the situation, mixed, 'charged' with new 'information content' and adjusted to the purpose of the inquirer, it will not be easy for the New York Times. Because ultimately, our entire knowledge is based on the knowledge of others and is remixed, 'charged' and changed by us after reading. I also think that the New York Times uses the contents of others to create new content.
- zozbot234 3y agoThe article mentions that ChatGPT will absolutely parrot back NYTimes article text verbatim. So yes, it's copyright infringement.
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- mritchie712 3y agoI'd bet they win, but how do you possibly measure the dollar amount? If you strip out 100% of NYT content from GPT-4, I don't think you'd notice a difference. But if you go domain by domain and continue stripping training data, the model will eventually get worse.
- kfk 3y agoTake estimated losses of the NYT from this "innovation" and multiply by 10^x where is "x" high enough to make tech companies stop and think before they break laws next time. That would be my approach at least.
- necroforest 3y agowhich laws are broken exactly? it's not remotely settled law that "training an NN = copyright infringement"
- noitpmeder 3y agoThe training isn't the issue per se, it's the regurgitation of verbatim text (or close enough to be immediately identifiable) within a for-profit product. Worse still that the regurgitation is done without attribution.
- LargeTomato 3y agoThe legal argument, which I'm sure you are very well aware of, is that training a model on data, reorganizing, and then presenting that data as your own is copyright infringement.
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- prepostertron 3y agoSurprised they don't mention Bard anywhere in the article. I wonder if the NYT has worked out some sort of licensing deal with Google for Bard, or if Bard isn't trained on NYT data? The lawsuit mentions this, so maybe they did work out some agreement to license their data: "For months, The Times has attempted to reach a negotiated agreement with Defendants, in accordance with its history of working productively with large technology platforms to permit the use of its content in new digital products (including the news products developed by Google, Meta, and Apple)."
- jvolkman 3y agoMaybe Bard's apparent "behindness" is less about Google's technical merits or lack thereof, and more about it being built with a sense of legal maturity that the competitors don't yet have. After all, Google must have some experience in this space, and we've seen them simply refuse to deploy Bard in regions where (presumably) there is too much legal uncertainty. If 2024's Gemini performs similarly to GPT4 while also navigating legal landmines, maybe it comes out ahead. Or maybe Bard's lawsuit just hasn't come yet.
- robg 3y agoCan someone explain the technical difference between what search engines do to index newspapers versus what is being claimed here? Is the difference as simple as me being able to get summaries and content from a newspaper from GPT without needing to visit their website?
- 23B1 3y agoNYTimes is an ad-supported business, so you visiting their website to read the content those ads pay for is important.
- gizmo385 3y agoA search engines principle job is to provide you with links you can find the answer to your question. The LLMs are ingesting all of that content en masse and would provide you the answer directly, with no compensation to the writers who actually did the research to provide that answer. Search engines are symbiotic, LLMs are parasitic.
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- mvcalder 3y agoDoes anyone know what the copyright status of LLM generated content is? That is, if I feed a NYT article into GPT4 and say, summarize this article, and then publish that summary, is there argument or precedent that says that is or is not copyright infringement? Asking for a friend.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoNo one knows, this is new territory. Maybe the fermi filter is litigating an AI that would otherwise save humanity.
- zozbot234 3y agoTypically if you ask a chatbot to "summarize" something, it will paraphrase the original closely enough that it would be considered plagiarism and copyright infringement. To avoid that, it's required to distill the relevant ideas contained in the text, and expound on them in a way that's not dependent on how the text itself was expressed, structured or organized. You would need to tell the model to do this over multiple steps, and then derive a rephrased article without looking at the original at all. (Which is not really possible if the article was in the AI's training set, as is the case here.)
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- lb4r 3y agoTechnically, you just send a request to OpenAI and they are the ones who feed it into GPT4. Although I'd argue this is irrelevant to your question, the law works in mysterious way so perhaps it carries some importance.
- greatNespresso 3y agoI still believe there's a place for a marketplace that rewards creators and journalism for their content if used as part of AI training specifically. As part of my exploration of that idea with faie.io, I got in touch with one exec in the publishing industry to speak about this and the desire was there. What felt sad to me was the lack of awareness from publishers around the existential threat that conversational search will pose to their business.
- mistrial9 3y agoit is a merciful subtext to this post however, let's be uncompromising in viewing the precendents that lead to this day. Approximately twenty years ago the Wordpress platform enabled millions of individuals to reliably self-publish. At that time there was considerable talk among certain circles, about monetization, especially "micropayments" .. also subscriptions, viewer circles, peer review and other approaches. For "mysterious reasons" the Google-Facebook ad model not only took over, but generated wealth on the levels of the Spanish gold raids on South America. Now, those that profited most mightily, and their chosen stewards, are taking with both hands, any and every piece of written work they see fit on the Net. The inside circle includes international military, who see this as a crucial new competitive advantage over others. The West is in disbelief generally over the digital citizenship created by China, and the level of daily surveillance on commercial activity in the West. Who exactly stood up and succeeded in diverting the past wave of copyright material pimping?
- greatNespresso 3y agoYour comment covers lots of interesting topics. Talking only about chatGPT+Bing's threat to press and content creators survival, the difference with WordPress is that you could generate revenue "on your own" through your audience. Either with ads or through subscription. Conversational search will only make people visit less websites and consume the content directly from the AI. And sometimes without attribution to the original source, meaning your chances to monetize, as the creator/journalist/publisher, fall down to zero.
- falcor84 3y agoThis is a wonderful holiday present. It's hard for me to imagine an outcome of this trial that I'd be against. Whoever loses (preferably both), it would be positive for society. It would even be great if the only outcome is that future LLM's are prohibited from using the NY Times's writing style.
- celdon25 3y agoI’m no fan of NYT but can you elaborate on this point? It is just a bare assertion.
- Aurornis 3y agoThe arguments about being able to mimic New York Times “style” are weak, but the fact that they got it to emit verbatim NY Times content seems bad for OpenAI: > As outlined in the lawsuit, the Times alleges OpenAI and Microsoft’s large language models (LLMs), which power ChatGPT and Copilot, “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim
- dwringer 3y agoI'm not sure if the verbatim content isn't more of a "stopped clock is right twice a day" or "monkeys typewriting shakespeare" situation. As I see it, most of the value in something like the NYT is as a trusted and curated source of information with at least some vetting. The content regurgitated from an LLM would be intermixed with false information and all sorts of other things, none of which are actually news from a trusted source - the main reason people subscribe to the NYT (?) and something at which ChatGPT cannot directly compete against NYT writers.
- Aurornis 3y ago> I'm not sure if the verbatim content isn't more of a "stopped clock is right twice a day" or "monkeys typewriting shakespeare" situation. I think it’s more nuanced than that. Extending the “monkeys on typewriters” example, it would be like training and evolving those monkeys using Shakespeare as the training target. Eventually they will evolve to write content more Shakespeare like. If they get so close to the target that some of them start reciting the Shakespeare they were trained on, you can’t really claim it was random.
- dwringer 3y agoIn the context of Shakespeare, I'd agree that there may be some competitive potential in the product. But in the context of news, something that evolves and relies on timely and accurate information, I don't see how something like that turns into competition for the NYT by being trained on past NYT outputs. If the argument is that people can use ChatGPT to get old NYT content for free, that can be illustrated simply enough, but as another commenter pointed out, it doesn't really seem to be that simple.
- lp4vn 3y agoFor me it's quite obvious that if you make a profit from an engine that has as an input copyrighted material, then you owe something to the owner of this copyrighted content. We have seen this same problem with artists claiming stable diffusion engines were using their art.
- theonlybutlet 3y agoDo all automakers that now develop electric cars owe Tesla something as they cashed in once they saw Tesla's successful copyrighted material l? A model is semantic, it contains the idea which is not copyrightable. Only how it is expressed could be copyrighted (i.e. if it outputs the copyright work verbatim). If this were not the case we would have plenty of monopolies and the world would fall apart.
- noitpmeder 3y agoIf Tesla thinks their competitors have violated any of their parents they are well within their rights to seek damages...
- theonlybutlet 3y agoOfcourse, my comment needs to be read in the context of what I'm responding to, they said input which I disagree with, output maybe there's a slight chance they have a case (depending on how openai has programmed it to output) and even then it's doubtful.
- pastor_bob 3y agohttps://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
- tiahura 3y agoShould Stranger Things have to pay Goonies and Steven King?
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- JCM9 3y agoThe challenge for all these AI companies is that the only thing of value for building a defensible commercial product is having proprietary datasets for training. With the underlying techniques and algorithms all being rapidly commoditized the power lies in who holds and owns that data. Like all other ML “revolutions” it’s the training data that matters and if one doesn’t have access to training data others don’t have then you’ll soon be toast.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoAnd I imagine that Gmail makes google very very special in this regard
- mbrumlow 3y agoExcept Gmail does not own the copyrights to the email. So in the context to this article and theme of the post, the owner of the data is king. I don’t think any court would rule Google owned a novel sent over Gmail, little alone the contents of more normative emails.
- steveoscaro 3y agoX might have a long-term edge if courts start ruling in favor of lawsuits like these? Being able to legally train on all Twitter data…
- jjtheblunt 3y agofrom the Google Terms of Service ( https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US ), makes me wonder who owns what, since users of Gmail agree to it. "We also collect the content you create, upload, or receive from others when using our services. This includes things like email you write and receive, photos and videos you save, docs and spreadsheets you create, and comments you make on YouTube videos."
- mbrumlow 3y agoCollect does not mean own.
- lupusreal 3y agoWould it even be possible for OpenAI to excise the NYTimes data from their models without running all the training again? Seems like a huge mess, particularly since they'd have to do that each time they lose a lawsuit.
- blagie 3y agoI think the train has left the station and the ship has sailed. I'm not sure it's possible to put this genie back in the bottle. I had stuff stolen by OpenAI too, and I felt bad about it (and even send them a nasty legal letter when it could output my creative work almost verbatim), but I think at this point, the legal landscape needs to somehow adjust. The Copyright Clause in the US Constitution is clear: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries Blocking LLMs on the basis of copyright infringement does NOT promote progress in science and the useful arts. I don't think copyright is a useful basis to block LLMs. They do need to be regulated, and quickly, but that regulatory regime should be something different. Not copyright. The concept of OpenAI before it became a frankenmonster for-profit was good. Private failed, and we now need public.
- elguyosupremo 3y agoEstablishing a legal route to train LLMs on copywriten content could certainly have a chilling affect on the progress of science and useful arts... Why would someone devote their life to their studies or craft when they know that an LLM will hoover it up and start plagiarizing it immediately?
- logicchains 3y agoThe vast majority of quality art and is produced by people who do it because they want to create art, not for money, and most artists earn little.
- CTmystery 3y agoI'm not sure that's actually true, even though we hear it often. The artists I know (about a dozen) are all trying to figure out how to make _more_ money from their art so that they can continue making their art
- macNchz 3y agoEven if that is the case, plenty of art is made with the hope or dream that people will find it worth paying for, and there are many people out there who do in fact fully support themselves doing creative work. Having the copyright to that work is foundational to even be able to consider that possibility at all.
- pelorat 3y agoTime to move LLM training to Japan who passed a law giving free reign to train LLMs on copyrighted material.
- mc32 3y agoAnd along with it, a different ideology would tag along. Not a bad thing, but Japan or China or Russia, don’t align with Anglo centered ideology, so keep that in mind.
- bitsage 3y agoDoes allowing a model to train on copyrighted material implicitly mean associated output would also be legal? They plan to expand upon this decision, but I’m curious in the meantime.[1]. I’d assume this NYT problem would still exist in Japan. [1]https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-panel-pushes-to-shield-copyrighted-work-from-AI-training https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-panel-push...
- dissident_coder 3y agoEven if they win against openAI, how would this prevent something like a Chinese or Russian LLM from “stealing” their content and making their own superior LLM that isnt weakened by regulation like the ones in the United States. And I say this as someone that is extremely bothered by how easily mass amounts of open content can just be vacuumed up into a training set with reckless abandon and there isn’t much you can do other than put everything you create behind some kind of authentication wall but even then it’s only a matter of time until it leaks anyway. Pandora’s box is really open, we need to figure out how to live in a world with these systems because it’s an un winnable arms race where only bad actors will benefit from everyone else being neutered by regulation. Especially with the massive pace of open source innovation in this space. We’re in a “mutually assured destruction” situation now, but instead of bombs the weapon is information.
- llm_nerd 3y agoI don't think they're looking to prevent the inevitable, but rather see a target with a fat wallet from which a lot of money can be extracted. I'm not saying this in a negative way, but much of the "this is outrageous!" reaction to AI hasn't been about the building of models, but rather the realization that a few players are arguably getting very rich on those models so other people want their piece of the action.
- dissident_coder 3y agoIf NYT wins this, then there is going to be a massive push for payouts from basically everyone ever…I don’t see that wallet being fat for long.
- noitpmeder 3y agoIf they are determined to have broken the law then they should absolute be made to pay damages to aggrieved parties (now, determining if they did and who those parties are is an entirely unknown can of worms)
- throw_nbvc1234 3y ago
- desireco42 3y agoThis is just rent seeking from dying media instead of working on creating something new in my view. AI indeed is reading and using material sa a source, but is deriving results based on that material. I think this should be allowed, but now it is a fight who has better paid politicians pretty much. I am open to hear other thoughts.
- ethanbond 3y agoHere’s another thought: It’s good that there are real incentives to produce original content. Especially investigative journalism which is an extremely tough business financially — even without LLMs — but with lots of social value. It would be silly to totally destroy the incentive to produce new technologies like LLMs, but so wouldn’t it be silly to destroy the incentive to produce original, high-quality content either for human or LLM consumption. FWIW the LLMs are obviously the ones rent-seeking here, if you’re trying to use the term for its actual meaning instead of just “charge a subscription for something I don’t want to pay for.”
- Zpalmtree 3y agoHow are the LLMs rent seeking? they are clearly providing value that people want to pay for..
- ethanbond 3y agoThis has to be one of the most abused terms on this website. “People are willing to pay for it” is not even relevant to the question of whether it’s rent-seeking. Rent-seeking has to do with capturing unearned wealth, i.e. taking someone else’s work and profiting from it. There is some portion of OAI’s (et al.) value that they themselves produce. There is another portion that is totally derivative of the data — other people’s work — they have trained on for free. A simple thought experiment can tell you to what degree OAI et al are “rent-seekers.” Imagine a world where they had to enter into mutual agreements in order to train on that data. How much would the AI companies be worth? Not quite zero, but fairly close (Andreessen pretty much stated this IIRC). How much would the data producers be worth? The exact same amount or more.
- KHRZ 3y agoIf I ask an LLM "repeat this sentence: [copyrighted sentence]", is that copyright infringement by the LLM, and recorders such as cameras and parrot toys, or middle scooler troll logic? Because apparantly this is the argument they want to take on Microsoft Bing with.
- logicchains 3y agoWhat next, suing the school system for using NYT articles in English class to train children?
- JCM9 3y agoUm, the Times gives newspapers to schools for this so I’m pretty sure they’re good with it. They’re going after people trying to make money off their content by selling it to others.
- noitpmeder 3y agoIf the school is selling access to those articles and/or passing the information off as their own original content? Yes.
- andy99 3y agoThe way to view this kind of parasitism is how we look at patent trolls. When you look at the RIAA/MPAA lawsuits, while I don't agree with them, at least file sharing was basically a canonical form of copyright infringement. With LLMs we have an aspect of a text corpus that the creators were not using (the language patterns) and had no plans for or even idea that it could be used, and then when someone comes along and uses it, not to reproduce anything but to provide minute iterative feedback in training, they run in to try and extract some money. It's parasitism. It doesn't benefit society, it only benefits the troll, there is no reason courts should enforce it. Someone should try and show that a NYT article can be generated autoregressively and argue it's therefore not copyrightable.
- ametrau 3y agoBut it’s theirs, they created it and should therefore benefit from it. I’m honestly shocked at how much these companies are getting away with. It’s piracy on a massive scale. You can get a little discombobulated reading the comments from the nerds / subject idiots on this site.
- noitpmeder 3y agoDon't forget that (almost assuredly) some percentage of HN comments are made by these very LLMs in question!!
- jimbob45 3y agoThe copyright laws are unjust to begin with. Copyright shouldn’t last beyond ten years anyway. Simply claiming that piracy is always bad ignores the evil of the laws in the first place.
- smoldesu 3y agoGeorge R. R. Martin authored A Game of Thrones, but lost in-court against Google when Google Books reproduced parts of his text verbatim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... No piracy or even AI was required, here. Google's defense was that their product couldn't reproduce the book in it's entirety, which was proven and made the prosecution about Fair Use instead. Given that it was much harder to prosecute on those grounds, Google tried coercing the authors into a settlement before eventually the District Court dropped the case in Google's favor altogether. OpenAI's lawyers are aware of the precedent on copyright law. They're going to argue their application is Fair Use, and they might get away with it.
- NiloCK 3y agoInteresting. I think the appropriation, privatization, and monetization of "all human output" by a single (corporate) entity is at least shameless, probably wrong, and maybe outright disgraceful. But I think OpenAI (or another similar entity) will succeed via the Sackler defense - OpenAI has too many victims for litigation to be feasible for the courts, so the courts must preemptively decide not to bother with compensating these victims.
- edanm 3y agoWhat do you mean when you say "appropriation and privatization" of "all human output"? The output is still there for anyone else to train on if they want.
- janice1999 3y ago> The output is still there for anyone else to train on if they want. Legal arguments aside, the goldrush era of data scraping is over. Major sources of content like Reddit and Twitter have killed APIs, added defenses and updated EULAs to avoid being pillaged again. More and more sites are moving content behind paywalls. There's also the small issue of having 10s of millions of VC dollars to rent/buy hundreds of high end GPUs. OpenAI and friends are also trying their hardest to prevent others doing so via 'Skynet' hysteria driven regulatory capture.
- ubutler 3y agoWhat does the Sackler defence refer to?
- aaomidi 3y agoOpioids.
- LordKeren 3y agoThe Sackler family owned Purdue Pharma, which created OxyContin and heavily marketed the drug. Many Americans see the family as partially responsible for kickstarting the opioid epidemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family The family has been largely successful at avoiding any personal liability in Purdue’s litigations. Many people feel the settlements of the Purdue lawsuits were too lenient. One of the key perceived aspects of the final settlements was that there was too many victims of the opioid epidemic for the courts to handle and attempt to make whole.
- PunchTornado 3y agoI hope Microsoft ends up paying billions and billions in damages and similar lawsuits will follow.
- rand1239 3y agoYou do copyright for content that you invented and which didn't exist before. But NYT content is reporting on events truthfully to the public without any fiction or lies. Since there can be only one truth it should not matter whether NYT or Washington Post or ChatGPT is spinning it out. Unless NYT is claiming they don't report truth and publishes fiction. That is of concern since, NYT claims to reporth news truthfully. So is NYT scamming Americans hundreds of millions of dollars by charging for subscription fees by making a false promise on things that they report? This should be the bigger question here.
- artninja1988 3y agoAFAIK facts like happenings in the world are not copyrightable. So I guess the nyt is arguing it's copying their prose and way of writing about them?
- mrkeen 3y agoYes. Journalism is a job. People do the work of turning these happenings into words, and are paid for it. That's what's stolen here. The value created through doing that work. If it didn't have value, Microsoft would lose nothing by no longer ingesting it.
- rand1239 3y ago> People do the work of turning these happenings into words, and are paid for it. That's what's stolen here. Stolen from whom? Journalists who got reported got paid. The owner is a billionaire. I don't understand your logic. Does NYT pays money to the people/countries etc it uses to as subject to create content(NEWS)? Isn't that stealing then? Also their website TOS didn't prohibit LLMs from using their data.
- mrkeen 3y ago> Stolen from whom? The owner is a billionaire. > ...owner... > Does NYT pays money to the people/countries etc it uses to as subject to create content(NEWS)? Isn't that stealing then? No, that's why in my reply to "facts like happenings in the world are not copyrightable" I emphasised do the work. Journalism is a job. Happenings do not just fall onto the page. > Also their website TOS didn't prohibit LLMs from using their data. This is just lazy. We have rule of law. Individuals don't need to write "don't break law X" to be protected by them. And nytimes does in fact have copyright symbols on its pages - not that it needs them.
- wg0 3y agoGoogle can look up into their index and can remove whatever they want to, within minutes. But how that can be possible for an LLM? That is, "decontaminate" the model from certain parts of the corups? I can only think of excluding the data set from the training and then retrain? As a side note, I think LLM frenzy would be dead in few years, 10 years time frame at max. The rent seeking on these LLMs as of today would no more be a viable or as profitable business model as more inference circuitry gets out in the wild into laptops and phones, more models get released, tweaked by the community and such. People thinking to downvote and dismiss this should see the history of commercial Unix and how that turned out to be today and how almost no workload (other than CAD, Graphics) runs on Windows or Unix including this very forum, I highly doubt is hosted on Windows or a commercial variant of Unix.
- pxoe 3y agomaybe they should build a better LLM? maybe they could ask the AI to make a better system. after all, tech and ai is so powerful that they could do virtually anything, except having accountability as it turns out.
- Firaxus 3y agoBut, wasn’t the reason proprietary unixes died out at major work horses because of a nearly feature comparable free alternative (Linux)? Extending the analogy, LLMs won’t die out, just proprietary ones. (Which is where I think this tech will actually go anyway.)
- wg0 3y agoLLMs won't die out but proprietary LLMs behind APIs might not have valuations of hundreds of billions of dollars. Crowd source, crowed trained (distributed training) fast enough, good enough generative models that are updated (and downloadable) every few months would start to erode the subscriber base gradually. I might be very very wrong here but it seems like so from where I see it.
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- breadwinner 3y agoHere's the most important part (from NYT story on the lawsuit [1]): In one example of how A.I. systems use The Times’s material, the suit showed that Browse With Bing, a Microsoft search feature powered by ChatGPT, reproduced almost verbatim results from Wirecutter, The Times’s product review site. The text results from Bing, however, did not link to the Wirecutter article, and they stripped away the referral links in the text that Wirecutter uses to generate commissions from sales based on its recommendations. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-microsoft-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t...
- crowcroft 3y agoWill be interesting to see where this ends up. If I scrape the NYT content, and then commercialize a service that lets users query that content through an API (occasionally returning verbatim extracts) without any agreement from or payment to the NYT, that would be illegal. It's not obvious to me why putting an LLM in the middle of the process changes that.
- munchler 3y agoAs long as you pay for your copy of the content and the extracts are fair use, how would that be illegal?
- crowcroft 3y agoIt wouldn’t, but ‘fair use’ is doing a lot of work in that rhetorical. Seems like a court would be a proper place to define what is and isn’t. Tbh I’m mostly curious about whether this settles out of court or whether it goes through the system and sets a precedent.
- sschueller 3y agoIf I were the CIA/US gov officials I would somehow want the NY Times to drop this case as one would not want AIs that don't have the talking points and propaganda pushed via papers not be part of the record. I am not saying that the NY Times is a CIA asset but from the crap they have printed in the past like the whole WMDs in Iraq saga and the puff piece of Elizabeth Holmes they are far from a completely independent and propaganda free paper. Henry Kissinger would call the paper and have his talking point printed the next day regarding Vietnam. [1] There is a huge conflict of access to government officials and independents of papers. [1] https://youtu.be/kn8Ocz24V-0?si=kWyWXztWGjS_AJVl https://youtu.be/kn8Ocz24V-0?si=kWyWXztWGjS_AJVl
- black6 3y ago> I am not saying that the NY Times is a CIA asset Operation Mockingbird. While the publication as a whole may not be an asset, there are most assuredly assets within its staff.
- jmyeet 3y agoWhen the US entered WWI, they couldn't build a plane despite inventing them. They had to buy planes from the French. Why? The Wright Brothers patent war [1]. This led to Congress creating a patent pool for avionics that exists to this day. Honestly, I get this feeling about these lawsuits about using content to train LLMs. Think of it this way: in growing up and learning to read and getting an education you read any number of books, articles, Web pages, magazines, etc. You viewed any number of artworks, buildings, cars, vehicles, furniture, etc, many of which might have design patents. We have such silliness as it being illegal to distribute photos commercially of the Eiffel Tower at night [2]. What's the differnce between training a model on text and images and educating a person with text and images, really? If I read too many NYT articles, am I going to get sued for using too much "training data"? Currently we need copious quantities of training data for LLMs. I believe this is because we're in the early days of this tech. I mean no person has read millions of articles or books. At some point models will get better with substantially smaller training sets. And then, how many articles is too many as far as these suits go? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war [2]: https://www.travelandleisure.com/photography/illegal-to-take-eiffel-tower-photos-at-night https://www.travelandleisure.com/photography/illegal-to-take...
- InCityDreams 3y agoNot silly at all when you actually read the article - "Photographing the Eiffel Tower at night is not illegal at all. Any individual can take photos and share them on social networks. But the situation is different for professionals. The Eiffel Tower's lighting and sparkling lights are protected by copyright, so professional use of images of the Eiffel Tower at night requires prior authorization and may be subject to a fee."
- BoiledCabbage 3y agoAll you're doing is repeating the fact. OP's point was, bluntly, "the situation is dumb". I happen to agree on that one. What is the benefit of copyrighting the Eiffel Tower? The purpose of copyright is not to say you can always make money off of what you created. It is to incentivize the creation of new things by allowing you to exclusively make money off of it for a while before its benefits can go to broader society. So what is the purpose of copyrighting the Eiffel tower? Would it not have been made if copyright wasn't in place? (obviously it would have because it was and the law wasn't in place yet). Second the claim is that the copyright is on the "lighting design" visible at night. Is the lighting design of the tower so unique that no-one else could come up with it? or is the lighting design necessitated by the structure of the tower itself? I'd say given the structure of the tower which restricts the lights, there is nothing sufficiently remotely unique or different to warrant copyright of the lighting design. Almost any design on that tower would look about the same. So how is society benefiting from copyrighting that lighting design? Exclusivity deals are almost always a net loss for society. Which is why whenever you see one you should be questioning if it should be in place. Exclusive contracts are anti free-market. Now there are absolutely valid places where they are justified and should be in place - but they should be questioned by default.
- kbos87 3y agoSolidly rooting for NYT on this - it’s felt like many creative organizations have been asleep at the wheel while their lunch gets eaten for a second time (the first being at the birth of modern search engines.) I don’t necessarily fault OpenAI’s decision to initially train their models without entering into licensing agreements - they probably wouldn’t exist and the generative AI revolution may never have happened if they put the horse before the cart. I do think they should quickly course correct at this point and accept the fact that they clearly owe something to the creators of content they are consuming. If they don’t, they are setting themselves up for a bigger loss down the road and leaving the door open for a more established competitor (Google) to do it the right way.
- hackerlight 3y agoDoesn't this harm open source ML by adding yet another costly barrier to training models?
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoIt doesn't matter what's good for open source ML. It matters what is legal and what makes sense.
- hackerlight 3y agoClearly if a law is bad then we should change that law. The law is supposed to serve humanity and when it fails to do so it needs to change.
- bbkane 3y agoIt matters what ends up being best for humanity, and I think there are cases to be made both ways on this
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- happosai 3y agoAnd Napster is long since gone, replaced by streaming services that pay (very little) to content creators. I expect the ML stuff go the same way. OpenAI is separated from MS because they can claim openAI is "research" and thus claim "research" exemption for fair use in copyright law.
- keiferski 3y agoAssuming that the OpenAI models were trained on NY Times articles (it's still unclear to me if they were directly, or if ChatGPT can just write an article "in the style of the NYT") – what I don't understand is, why run the risk of this situation? Did no one stop and think, "Hmm, maybe we should just use freely available text sources and not the paywalled articles of the most wealthy newspaper in the country?" Leaving the ethics of doing so aside, it just seems like an exceptionally poor tactical move.
- halukakin 3y agoFor many of our google searches, the first results tend to be wikipedia, instagram, etc... We click on those clicks and both google and the clicked website get a share of our traffic. So it is somewhat fair. But in current AI situation, wikipedia, nytimes, stackoverflow etc are getting a pretty unfair deal. Probably all major text based outlets are seeing a drop in their numbers now...
- mrweasel 3y ago> “copying and using millions” of the publication’s articles and now “directly compete” with its content as a result. The New York Times doesn't have a lot faith in the quality of their own content. How on earth is ChatGPT going to go out into the world a do reporting from Gaza or Ukraine? How is it going to go to the presidents press conference and ask questions? ChatGPT cannot produce original content in the same way a newspaper can. The fact that the NYT seems to believe that ChatGPT can compete says a lot about how they write their articles or their lack of understanding of how LLMs work. Now I do believe that OpenAI could at least have asked the newspapers before just scraping their content, but I think they knew that that would have undermined their business model, which tells you something about how tech companies work.
- indigodaddy 3y agoIs the answer for LLMs/OpenAI to properly cite/give credit to the authoritative source? If they did that, would NYT still have a claim/case? I’d still think yes because the content is not publicly available/behind a paywall, so some sort of different subscription/redistribution of content license would likely be appropriate ? But then after that license/agreement (which I assume they must already have something like this in place, no?) if they cite/give credit to the source instead of a rewording/summarization/claiming as it’s own, seemingly that might be enough to thwart legal challenges?
- JCM9 3y agoThese lawsuits could end up being a nightmare for AI companies if the plaintiffs are successful. One can’t easily just remove the content from a model like you can from a website if someone sends you a takedown notice. The content is deeply embedded inside the mathematical relationships within the model. You’d basically have to retrain the whole model again sans the offending data. Given the cost to retrain just a few successful claims would destroy any business built around making money off these models. The times appears to have a strong case here with their complaint showing long verbatim passages being produced by ChatGPT that go far beyond any reasonable claim of fair use. This will be an interesting case to watch that could shape the whole Generative AI space.
- soultrees 3y agoHere come the innovation sponges. If this goes through then the models that the general public have access are going to be severely neutered while the ownership class will have a much better model that will never see the light of day due to legal risks and claims like this - therefore increasing the disparity between us all.
- oliveshell 3y ago[flagged]
- soultrees 3y agoI’d like a productive comment if you have it.
- oliveshell 3y agoI'd've liked very much to give you one, but your blanket dismissal of what I consider to be a very important step for the field of AI ethics as the work of "Innovation Sponges" reveals that we fundamentally disagree about some pretty big underlying issues here. In the future, if you wish to invite productive comments and not curt dismissal, consider framing your concerns as potential risks rather than the cynical expressions of fatalistic certainty so often employed by naive, greedy technologists when regulation that is firmly in the public interest threatens their paychecks.
- soultrees 3y agoFair enough and your criticism is appreciated.
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- oliveshell 3y agoI made a reply about rolling my eyes to this comment that got flagged (rightly so); this was unproductive and impulsive and I admit I shouldn't have done it. I'm not sure how HN handles replies to flagged comments, so I'm posting the following here in the hopes it'll be seen by more fellow technical people : In the future, if you wish to invite productive comments from your audience and not curt dismissal, consider framing your concerns as potential risks rather than the cynical expressions of fatalistic certainty so often employed by naive, greedy technologists when regulation that is firmly in the public interest threatens their paychecks.
- notfed 3y agoAnd here I am thinking it'd be amazing to have an AI that can on-demand read me every novel ever written. It'd be even cooler to jump into a text adventure game of any novel and have it actually follow the original text. I guess that clashes with our copyright world. (Is there hope of some kind of Netflix/Spotify model, with fractional royalties?)
- ImPleadThe5th 3y agoI don't think anyone is saying that shouldn't be allowed. But there should be some model for consent/renumeration for the author of the original content.
- d0gsg0w00f 3y ago"I want a red boat. My neighbor has a blue boat. It would be cool if I took my neighbor's boat and made it red."
- dankle 3y agoGood. I hope they win.
- adolph 3y agoIs there something in their license that forbids the use of their content to train a model?
- andy99 3y agoWhen it comes to foundation models I think there needs to be a distinction between potential and actual infringement. You can use a broadly trained foundation model to generate copyright infringing content, just like you can use your brain to do so. But the fact that a model can generate such content doesn't mean it infringes by its mere existence. https://www.marble.onl/posts/general_technology_doesnt_violate_copyright.html https://www.marble.onl/posts/general_technology_doesnt_viola...
- TekMol 3y agoThe actual complaint is here: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20... They state that "with minimal prompting", ChatGPT will "recite large portions" of some of their articles with only small changes. I wonder why they don't sue the wayback machine first. You can get the whole article on the wayback machine. Not just portions. And not with small changes but verbatim. And you don't need any special prompting. As soon as you are confronted with a paywall window on the times websites, all you need to do is to go to the wayback machine, paste the url and you can read it.
- alex201 3y agoSuch incidents mark the end of an era. The diminishing relevance of traditional media in the digital age is afoot. I feel sorry for those who feed their families through this industry, but they need to learn and adapt before it's too late. Even if this lawsuit finds merit, it's akin to temporarily holding back a tsunami with a mere stick. A momentary reprieve, but not a sustainable solution. I agree with those who say power matters. There are players out there who don't care about copyrights. They will win if the "good guys" fall into the trap of protecting old information models by limiting the potential of new tech. Such event should be a clear signal: evolve or risk obsolescence.
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- overvale 3y agoI agree that the tide is turning, but I don't think the argument that actual criminal behavior (I don't know if that's what OpenAI did, but that's what NYT alleges) should be glossed over in the name of progress.
- 6stringmerc 3y agoExcellent! I am all for this type of contested reality with sources and derivative works. You feed in something you can’t claim it’s not being used in a way that isn’t allowed if you can’t explain how the fuck your little box works in the first place. I mean seriously pouring gasoline on yourself and playing with matches is about the same cause and effect of input output.
- ImPleadThe5th 3y agoIf AI companies wanted to train their models on good content, they had a chance to create a second Renaissance. Funding artist collectives to create content for their models. Paying royalties to authors. Generally increasing the value of human art while creating a new form of expression. Instead they do what every large corporation does and treat art like content. They are making loads of money off the backs of artists who are already underpaid and often undervalued and they didn't have the decency to ask for permission. I know publishers don't treat authors much better. But I see this as NYT fighting for their journalists.
- seivan 3y ago[dead]
- solardev 3y agoI hope this results in Fair Use being expanded to cover AI training. This is way more important to humanity's future than any single media outlet. If the NYT goes under, a dozen similar outlets can replace them overnight. If we lose AI to stupid IP battles in its infancy, we end up handicapping probably the single most important development in human history just to protect some ancient newspaper. Then another country is going to do it anyway, and still the NYT is going to get eaten.
- charonn0 3y agoIf the NYT goes under, why would its replacement fare any better?
- solardev 3y agoThey'd probably have a different business model, like selling clickbait articles written by AI with sex and controversy galore. I'm not saying AI is better for journalism than NYT reporters, just that it's more important. Journalism has been in trouble for decades, sadly -- and I say that as a journalism minor in college. Trump gave the papers a brief respite, but the industry continues to die off, consolidate, etc. We probably need a different business model altogether. My vote is just for public funding with independent watchdogs, i.e. states give counties money to operate newspapers with citizen watchdog groups/boards. Maaaaybe there's room for "premium" niche news like 404 Media/The Information/Foreign Affairs/National Review/etc., but that remains to be seen. If the NYT paywall doesn't keep them alive, I doubt this lawsuit will.
- rand1239 3y agoNews media like NYT, Fox etc are tools for high scale brainwashing public by the elite. This is why you see all the News papers have some political ideology. If they were reporting on truth and not opinions they won't have the need for leaning. Also you never see the journalists reporting against their own publication. Humanity is better off without these mass brainwashing systems. Millions of independent journalists will be better outcome for humanity.
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- ssully 3y agoHaven’t seen anyone mention how Apple is exploring deals with news publishers, like the NYTimes, to train its LLMs[1]. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-publishers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-...
- mcculley 3y agoA minimum requirement for LLMs should be documentation of the corpus it was trained on.
- make3 3y agoI hate that this will likely be decided by a 75 years old judge that hasn't been close to a computer since getting his 15 years old grandson to fix his patience game
- hotpotamus 3y agoThis attitude itself seems quite out of date in modern times. My dad is 70 and brought home a 486 in the 90's which was my first computer, and he didn't work in technology; the people who did got their computers about a decade before that. People can still be bad with tech, but the Greatest Generation (who were obviously first in line when they were handing out generation names) and Silent Generation are basically gone and on the way out respectively and were really the last ones who could use the excuse that they never learned them. Boomers might not have been born with the tech, but it was an important force in the world for the majority of their lives.
- sensanaty 3y agoYeah the whole thing with Zucc's trial highlighted this perfectly for me, a bunch of clueless old dolts who have no fucking idea how anything in the modern age works. I'm eagerly awaiting the time where the people making these decisions at least have some sort of baseline level of understanding, otherwise these psychopathic megacorps will keep getting away with things based on technicalities and the judge's lack of knowledge.
- dboreham 3y agoThe sound of it all ending in tears.
- collaborative 3y agoSo the NYT wants its content to be indexed by search engines, therefore makes it public to all crawlers, but then complains when some crawlers use the content to train AI on it? This issue is about the NYT wanting to lure internet users into its biased and politically motivated news website (and make them pay for it). If the NYT wants to they can block crawlers and rely on loyal readers typing nytimes.com in the browser. Easy. But competing is hard. It was easier when they could just control shelf space in kiosks
- janalsncm 3y agoYes, it’s ok to reproduce the headline and banner image for search visibility. Not the whole article. Whether their coverage is biased or not is immaterial to their legal argument.
- jakeinspace 3y agoI don't see a judge ruling that training a model on copyrighted works to be infringement, I think (hope) that that is ruled to be protected as fair use. It's the LLM output behaviour, specifically the model's willingness to reproduce verbatim text which is clearly a violation of copyright, and should rightfully result in royalties being paid out. It also seems like something that should be technically feasible to filter out or cite, but with a serious cost (both in compute and in latency for the user). Verbatim text should be easy to identify, although it may require a Google Search - level amount of indexing and compute. As for summaries and text "in the style of" NYT or others, that's the tricky part. Not sure there's any high-precision way to identify that on the output side of an LLM, though I can imagine a GAN trained to do so (erring on the side of false-positives). Filtering-out suspiciously infringe-ish outputs and re-running inference seems much more solvable than perfect citations for non-verbatim output.
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- reqo 3y agoI think in the long run, it is in the interest of AI companies to incentivize creators to create high quality data! Not paying them their fair share will likely decrease the volume of high quality data available (or make it much less accessible). Unless these companies already have developed another architecture that can learn much more from the same dataset, the lack of new high quality data will be a problem for future larger models!
- rand1239 3y ago> Not paying them their fair share will likely decrease the volume of high quality data available It won't. Thats not how capitalisam works. If high quality data became unavailable, then companies will be created to fix the problem. Only they look quite different from NYT. Just like how Torrents didn't kill movie industry. These are lazy arguments made by people who want to make money through lawsuits. Also I can guarentee you even in worst case, humanity would survive just fine without those high quality content just like it did for the past 50K+ years. What you should actually be concerned about is stupid law suits like this that can prevent progress. AI could help humanity solve more pressing problems like cancer. By getting caught up in silly law suits like this and delaying progress one can make a case that you bring more suffering to the world.
- arxpoetica 3y agoWe may well look back on these lawsuits and laugh. AI will likely steamroll current copyright considerations. If we live in a world where anything can be generated at whim, copyright considerations will seem less and less relevant or even possible. Wishful thinking, but maybe we'll all turn away from obsession with ownership, and instead turn to feeding the poor, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and afflicted.
- dogman144 3y agoIf meatspace’s non-technical industries and social/civil organs get the wool pulled over their eyes again, they deserve whatever tech-induced industry chaos that occurs - search/ad revenue models destroying journalism, social media destroying our civics and bonds, “move fast and break civil regs” (which have real people and their lives behind it) with Airbnb and rideshare, and now maybe LLMs and content ownership.
- Geisterde 3y agoMaybe the NYT should do more to protect its own content, it could go back to exclusively being a newspaper, they seem to understand that better than this whole internet funny business.
- rand1239 3y agoYeah. But then how do you make money through all those ad impressions that you can ingest all over the internet right?
- lokar 3y agoWhen I was studying AI in grad school many years ago getting good big data sets was always an issue. It never occurred to me to just copy one without permission.
- TrackerFF 3y agoAnd therein lies the value of indexing huge amounts of data, which alphabet (google, youtube, etc.), Microsoft (bing, etc.), and similar companies have been doing for years now. If it is legal to simply index a website, then why shouldn't it be legal to train a model in the very same data? Of course, websites should have some option for declining data mining for ML/AI purposes, in the same way the can decline scraping/indexing in the robots.txt file. But that ship has kind of sailed, unless the courts decide otherwise.
- octacat 3y agoSomeone should train some AI on decompiled code of Windows (not encouraging, but it would be interesting). Copyright is important for corpos when it protects their interests. Producing exact text as in NYT articles is pretty much a copyright violation. At least the last time the companies were trying to blame each other that their Java API implementations look pretty similar. Even for open source code you cannot just remove the authors and license, replace some functions and say "oh, it is my code now". Only public domain code would allow these. But with copilot you could.
- meroes 3y agoThere are verbatim and almost verbatim copyrighted works, lengthier than any fair use I’ve seen permissible, outputted which they charge money for and don’t have licensing for. What am I missing?
- pcurve 3y agoOpenAI may have had some leg to stand on before. But once you start monetizing, all bets are off.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoI honestly thought that OpenAI had simply paid for access to the new corpus. I'm actually on the side of OpenAI here - if you put something on the web, you can't get upset when people read it. Training a neural network is not functionally different from a human reading it and remembering it. But if I were OpenAI, I would have tried to do a deal to pay them anyway. Having official access is surely easier than scraping the web - and the optics of it is much better.
- whichfawkes 3y agoIt seems weird to sue an AI company because their tool "can recite [copyrighted]" content verbatim. If I paid a human to recite the whole front page of the New York Times to me, they could probably do it. There's nothing infringing about that. However, if I videotape them reciting the front page of the New York Times and start selling that video, then I'd be infringing on the copyright. The guy that I paid to tell me about what NYT was saying didn't do anything wrong. Whether there's any copyright infringement would depend what I did with the output.
- voltaireodactyl 3y agoIn your analogy, AI would be the videotape, not the person, because OpenAI is selling access to it.
- whichfawkes 3y agoI'm not so sure about that. It seems to me that they're selling me a service. Just like I might pay for a subscription to Adobe Photoshop or pay per-render fees to a rendering farm. I could use Photoshop to reproduce a copyrighted work, and in some circumstances (i.e. personal use) that'd be fine. Or I could use Photoshop to reproduce a copyrighted work and try to sell it for profit, which would clearly not be fine. Nobody is saying that Adobe has to recognize whether or not the pixels I'm editing constitute a copyrighted work or not.
- voltaireodactyl 3y agoThe difference here is that Adobe is selling a set of tools that can recreate copyrighted work from the ground up. The Mona Lisa being previously incorporated into their tools is not a foundational necessity for their paintbrush to brush digital paint. The same is not true for AI, which require copyrighted work be contained therein, in order for the tool part to function.
- kuchenbecker 3y agoWhile I 100% agree, there is another angle to consider this from, in that ChatGPT replaces reading the NYT. ChatGPT competes with it in the delivery of information. To add to your point though, a sufficiently advanced AI trained on licensed data could reproduce copywrited content from prompt alone. It's the next step that would cause infringement where someone does something withcthe output.
- DamnInteresting 3y agoI have deeply mixed feelings about the way LLMs slurp up copyrighted content and regurgitate it as something "new." As a software developer who has dabbled in machine learning, it is exciting to see the field progress. But I am also an author with a large catalog of writings, and my work has been captured by at least one LLM (according to a tool that can allegedly detect these things). Overall, current LLMs remind me of those bottom-feeder websites that do no original research--those sites that just find an article they like, lazily rewrite it, introduce a few errors, then maybe paste some baloney "sources" (which always seems to disinclude the actual original source). That mode of operation tends to be technically legal, but it's parasitic and lazy and doesn't add much value to the world. All that aside, I tend to agree with the hypothesis that LLMs are a fad that will mostly pass. For professionals, it is really hard to get past hallucinations and the lack of citations. Imagine being a perpetual fact-checker for a very unreliable author. And laymen will probably mostly use LLMs to generate low-effort content for SEO, which will inevitably degrade the quality of the same LLMs as they breed with their own offspring. "Regression to mediocrity," as Galton put it.
- MeImCounting 3y agoEhh LLMs have become a fundamental part of my work flow as a professional. GPT4 is absolutely capable of providing links to sources and citations. It is more reliable than most human teachers I have had and doesnt have an ego about its incorrect statements when challenged on them. It does become less useful as you get more technical or niche but its incredibly useful for learning in new areas or increasing the breadth of your knowledge on a subject.
- cjbprime 3y ago> GPT4 is absolutely capable of providing links to sources and citations. Do you mean in the Browsing Mode or something? I don't think it is naturally capable of that, both because it is performing lossy compression, and because in many cases it simply won't know where the text that was fed to it during training came from.
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- devd00d 3y agoHonestly very surprised it took this long. It's been an elephant in the room for ages.
- nikolay 3y agoAnyway, it's better for OpenAI not to get trained with biased media such as NYT and Fox News!
- anigbrowl 3y agoLOL fuck the NYT That's like suing someone who had an NYT subscription and read the paper daily for occasionally quoting a choice phrase verbatim. I've been quite critical of AIs impact on the livelihood of artists (whose economic position is precarious to start with, and who are now faced with replacement by machine generated art) but at the same time I reject the copyright complaint completely. Transformers are very obviously doing something else, similar to how a human learns and recreates; the key difference is that they can do it at scale unreachable by individuals.
- Racing0461 3y agoI feel like there is a way to get around this where you use as many materials (books, newspapers, crawling websites etc) to generate the LLM so it can be good at reasoning/next token generation but it can only use reference knowledge files to answer your question that a user uploads at the time of asking.
- superduty 3y agoIf models are training on NYT content the future of AI is horrific.
- dang 3y agoWe've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments and using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not what this site is for. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- superduty 3y ago[dead]
- mrobot 3y agoI'm wondering how private models will diverge from public ones. Specifically for large "private" datasets like those of the NSA, but also for those for private personal use. For the NSA and other agencies, i am guessing in the relative freedom from public oversight they enjoy that they will develop an unrestricted large model which is not worried about copyright -- can anyone think of why this might not be the case? It is interesting to think about the power dynamic between the users of such a model and the public. Also interesting to think about the benefits of simply being an employee of one of these agencies (or maybe just he government in general) will have on your personal experience in life. I do recall articles elucidating that at the NSA, there were few restrictions on employee usage of data and there were/are many instances of employees abusing surveillance data toward effect in their personal life. I guess if extended to this situation, that would mean there would be lots of personal use of these large models with little oversight and tremendous benefit to being an employee. I have also wondered, with just how bad search engines have gotten (a lot of it from AI generated spam), about current non-AI discrepancies between the NSA and the public. Meaning can i just get a better google by working at the NSA? I would think maybe because the requirements are different than that of an ad company. They have actual incentive to build something resistant to SEO outside of normal capitalist market requirements. For personal users, i wonder if the lack of concern for copyright will be a feature / selling point for the personal-machine model. It seems from something i read here that companies like Apple may be diverging toward personal-use AI as part of their business model. I supposed you could build something useful that crawls public data without concern for copyright and for strictly personal use. Of course, the sheer resources in machine-power and money-power would not be there. I guess legislation could be written around this as well. Thoughts?
- aomix 3y agoIs there a decent guess at how much training data for ChatGPT is copyrighted work and subject to being removed depending on a few court cases? GPT4 is supposed to be an order of magnitude larger than the open source models that use essentially everything that can be used without asking. So that whole magnitude?
- tim333 3y agoIt's going to be hard legally to distinguish between a human reading the Times and answering questions and a LLM doing the same. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out in court.
- emrah 3y agoVerbatim usage of content is copyright infringement obviously but speaking English is not. Learning from content is not copyright infringement either. I don't know if NYT has a clause for this type of usage of their content but still I don't think it would be covered by copyright the way I understand it As long as an LLM rephrases what it learned and not regurgitate verbatim text, it should be fine but we'll see what the judge says
- mensetmanusman 3y agoIf copyright lasted 20 years like patents, it would be reasonable for AI companies to wait. 100 years is not reasonable.
- telotortium 3y agoComplaint: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...
- twelve40 3y agogood, finally someone with PR clout is calling out the massive theft that happened. During their AI land grab "Open"AI conveniently ignored opt-in, out-out, revshare and other norms and civilized rules followed elsewhere.
- Imnimo 3y agoThis looks a lot more convincing to me than the Copilot lawsuit or the Sarah Silverman one. This suit shows ChatGPT reciting large amounts of NYT articles - not just little snippets of code or the ability to answer questions about Silverman's book. It feels like even if training on copyrighted data is fair use (and I think it should be), that wouldn't give you a pass on regurgitating that training data to anyone who asks.
- 6R1M0R4CL3 3y agoi dont know. the new york times is keeping those pages online and accessible. if a human can go check those pages, and take notes, the same human can write code that will go read those pages and produce notes, or data based on the contents. call is AI if you like, doesnt matter. the nyt has that content online, and accessible. and on internet, there is no difference between a human grabbing that data, or a machine. if you put content on internet and accessible to humans, why do you want to now say to people that if it's a machine that does it, suddenly you do not agree ? i am free to write code or design a machine to go get that data, and do whatever i want with it (as long as i don't do something illegal like stealing content under copyright) and i don't give a F about the "terms of use" those morons put online, because those have NO value. there is either a contract signed by two parties, or there is not. and content you put on internet, and accessible to everyone that sends you a GET, is like writing stuff on a page, and putting that page outside on the street. we could use humans to go read all those pages, and create new content from it from the knowledge gained on those various subjects. machine are here to reproduce what humans can do, to free us time for more interesting things. those servers that send data back from a GET, it is the same request when it's done by me, a human, or a machine. and those morons did put that data there, accessible to all, so now to see them cry foul makes me laugh.
- wdr1 3y agoSad to see, but not surprising. In 2011, Google found that Microsoft was basically copying Google results. (It's actually an interesting story of how Google proved it. Search for "hiybbprqag")
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- edwintorok 3y agoThey are not the only ones to sue. There is also a class action: https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/
- giardini 3y agoA ChatGPT that was English language literate to the level of Victorian England, scientifically literate from library books and fed news from the Lincoln Journal Star (a Nebraska newpaper) would be more than sufficient for most of my needs. Cut NYT out of the loop, fu*'em! Let them sell their own damned GPT and then charge them like crazy for the license.
- stupidadd 3y ago[dead]
- fennecbutt 3y agoHe he, people will wanna treat LLM learning different to their own learning. I think it's fine, as long as it was fed publicly accessible content, without any payment or subscription then it's accessible to an LLM as it is to you and I and that's fair. And for the people that screech about LLMs being different because they can mass produce derivative works; first of all, ALL works are derivative and if machine produced works are compelling enough to compete with human produced ones then clearly humans need to get better at it. The automatic loom took over from weavers cause it was better, if it wasn't then people would still work as weavers.
- fennecbutt 3y agoI've just tried to get gpt35 to spit out an NYT article verbatim in all sorts of ways and it just can't. It will compile an article that "looks like" NYT's (or any other news site) but none of the paragraphs were a match for any of their articles that I could find. I'm really curious to see what evidence they have for the case beyond "it can claim to be NYT and write an article composed of all sorts of bullshit from every corner of the Web".
- ouraf 3y agoToo little too late, though. The push for AI models trained on synthetic data. A model poisoned with copyrighted material can be tweaked and train its sucessor with the knowledge and meaning of a copyrighted work, but avoiding paraphrasing or other easy giveaways of a copyrighted source
- nojvek 3y ago> For example, in 2019, The Times published a Pulitzer-prize winning, five-part series on predatory lending in New York City’s taxi industry. The 18-month investigation included 600 interviews, more than 100 records requests, large-scale data analysis, and the review of thousands of pages of internal bank records and other documents, and ultimately led to criminal probes and the enactment of new laws to prevent future abuse. > OpenAI had no role in the creation of this content, yet with minimal prompting, will recite large portions of it verbatim. This is the smoking gun. GPT-4 is a large model and hence highly likely to reproduce content. They have many such examples in the court filing https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20... IANAL but that's a slam dunk of copyright violation. NYT will likely win. Also why OpenAI should not go YOLO scaling up to GPT-5 which will likely recite more copyrighted content. More parameters, more memorization.