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Solidly 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 f

by kbos87 3y ago

Solidly 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 ago
Doesn't this harm open source ML by adding yet another costly barrier to training models?
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  It doesn't matter what's good for open source ML. It matters what is legal and what makes sense.
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    Clearly 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 ago
    It matters what ends up being best for humanity, and I think there are cases to be made both ways on this
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - joquarky 3y ago
      People often get buried in the weeds about the purpose of copyright. Let us not forget that the only reason copyright laws exist is > 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 If copyright is starting to impede rather than promote progress, then it needs to change to remain constitutional.
      - tbrownaw 3y ago
        Do other countries all use the same reasoning?
        MetaWhirledPeas 3y ago
        I don't think this was your point, but no they don't. Specifically China. What will happen if China has unbridled training for a decade while the United States quibbles about copyright? I think publications should be protected enough to keep them in business, so I don't really know what to make of this situation.
      - nsagent 3y ago
        The reason copyright promotes progress is that it incentives individuals and organizations to release works publicly, knowing their works are protected against unlawful copying. The end game when large content producers like The New York Times are squeezed due to copyright not being enforced is that they will become more draconian in their DRM measures. If you don't like paywalls now, watch out for what happens if a free-for-all is allowed for model training on copyrighted works without monetary compensation. I had a similar conversation with my brother-in-law who's an economist by training, but now works in data science. Initially he was in the side of OpenAI, said that model training data is fair game. After probing him, he came to the same conclusion I describe: not enforcing copyright for model training data will just result in a tightening of free access to data. We're already seeing it from the likes of Twitter/X and Reddit. That trend is likely to spread to more content-rich companies and get even more draconian as time goes on.
        3y ago
  - z7 3y ago
    Slavery was legal...
    - belter 3y ago
      Still is in many countries with excellent diplomatic relations with the Western World: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-kafala-system https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-kafala-system
  - shkkmo 3y ago
    The law on this does not currently exist. It is in the process of being created by the courts and legistatures. I personally think that giving copyright holders control over who is legally allowed to view a work that has been made publicly available is a huge step in the wrong direction. One of those reasons is open source, but really that argument applies just as well to making sure that smaller companies have a chance of competing. I think it makes much more sense to go after the infringing uses of models rather than putting in another barrier that will further advantage the big players in this space.
    - jrajav 3y ago
      Copyright holders already have control over who is legally allowed to view a work that has been made publicly available. It's the right to distribution. You don't waive that right when you make your content free to view on a trial basis to visitors to your site, with the intent of getting subscriptions - however easy your terms are to skirt. NYT has the right to remove any of their content at any time, and to bar others from hosting and profiting on the content.
    - rndmwlk 3y ago
      It’s disingenuous to frame using data to train a model as a “view,” of that data. The simple cases are the easy ones, if ChatGPT completely rips a NYT article then that’s obviously infringement; however, there’s an argument to be made that every part of the LLM training dataset is, in part, used in every output of that LLM. I don’t know the solution, but I don’t like the idea that anything I post online that is openly viewable is automatically opted into being part of ML/AI training data, and I imagine that opinion would be amplified if my writing was a product which was being directly threatened by the very same models.
      - bluefirebrand 3y ago
        All I can ever think about with how ML models work is that they sound an awful lot like Data Laundering schemes. You can get basically-but-not-quite-exactly the copyrighted material that it was trained on. Saw this a lot with some earlier image models where you could type in an artists name and get their work back. The fact that AI models are having to put up guardrails to prevent that sort of use is a good sign that they weren't trained ethically and they should be paying a ton of licensing fees to the people whose content they used without permission.
  - soulofmischief 3y ago
    It doesn't matter what is legal. It matters what is right. Society is about balancing the needs of the individual vs the collective. I have a hard time equating individual rights with the NYT and I know my general views on scraping public data and who I was rooting for in the LinkedIn case.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - notahacker 3y ago
      I have an even harder time equating individual rights with the spending of $xx billion in Azure compute time and payment of a collective $0 to millions of individuals who involuntarily contribute training material to create a closed source, commercial service allowing a single company to compete with all the individuals currently employed to create similar work. NYT just happens to be an entity that can afford to fight Microsoft in court.
      - hackerlight 3y ago
        I don't see a problem as long as there's taxation. Look at SpaceX. They paid a collective $0 to the individuals who discovered all the physics and engineering knowledge. Without that knowledge they're nothing. But still, aren't we all glad that SpaceX exists? In exchange for all the knowledge that SpaceX is privatizing, we get to tax them. "You took from us, so we get to take it back with tax." I think the more important consideration isn't fairness it's prosperity. I don't want to ruin the gravy train with IP and copyright law. Let them take everything, then tax the end output in order to correct the balance and make things right.
    - jeremyjh 3y ago
      When we're discussing litigation, it certainly matters what is legal.
      - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
        And also - if what is legal isn't right, we live in a democracy and should change that. Saying what's legal is irrelevant is an odd take. I like living in a place with a rule of law.
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    setting legality as a cornerstone of ethics is a very slippery slope :)
- bbor 3y ago
  I think not, because stealing large amounts of unlicensed content and hoping momentum/bluster/secrecy protects you is a privilege afforded only to corporations. OSS seems to be developing its own, transparent, datasets.
- pxoe 3y ago
  open source won't care. they'll just use data anyway. closed/proprietary services that also monetize - there's a question whether it's "fair" to take and use data for free, and then basically resell access to it. the monetization aspect is the bigger rub than just data use. (maybe it's worth noting again that "openai" is not really "open" and not the same as open source ai/ml.) taking data, maybe it's data that's free to take, and then as freely distributing resulting work, that's really just fine. taking something for free (without distinction, maybe it's free, maybe it's supposed to stay free, maybe it's not supposed to be used like that, maybe it's copyrighted), and then just ignoring licenses/relicensing and monetizing without care, that's just a minefield.
- layer8 3y ago
  You can train your own model no problem, but you arguably can’t publish it. So yes, the model can’t be open-sourced, but the training procedure can.
theGnuMe 3y ago
It’s likely fair use.
- JCM9 3y ago
  Playing back large passages of verbatim content sold as your “product” without citation is almost certainly not fair use. Fair use would be saying “The New York Times said X” and then quoting a sentence with attribution. Thats not what OpenAI is being sued for. They’re being sued for passing off substantial bits of NYTimes content as their own IP and then charging for it saying it’s their own IP. This is also related to earlier studies about OpenAI where their models have a bad habit of just regurgitating training data verbatim. If your trained data is protected IP you didn’t secure the rights for then that’s a real big problem. Hence this lawsuit. If successful, the floodgates will open.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    At the root, it seems like there's also a gap in copyright with respect to AI around transformative. Is using something, in its entirety, as a tiny bit of a massive data set, in order to produce something novel... infringing? That's a pretty weird question that never existed when copyright was defined.
    - layer8 3y ago
      Replace the AI model by a human, and it should become pretty clear what is allowed and what isn’t, in terms of published output. The issue is that an AI model is like a human that you can force to produce copyright-infringing output, or at least where you have little control over whether the output is copyright-infringing or not.
      - bawolff 3y ago
        Its less clear than you think, and comes down more on how OpenAI is commercially benefiting and competiting with NYT than what they actually did. (See four factors of fair use)
    - 3y ago
belter 3y ago
For all the leaks on: Secret projects, novelty training algorithms not being published anymore so as to preserve market share, custom hardware, Q* learning, internal politics at companies at the forefront of state of the art LLMs...A thunderous silence is the lack of leaks, on the exact datasets used to train the main commercial LLMs. It is clear OpenAI or Google did not use only Common Crawl. With so many press conferences why did no research journalist ask yet from OpenAI or Google to confirm or deny if they use or used LibGen? Did OpenAI really bought an ebook of every publication from Cambridge Press, Oxford Press, Manning, APress, and so on? Did any of investors due diligence, include researching the legality of the content used for training?
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Would be fascinated to hear from someone inside on a throwaway, but my nearest experience is that corporate lawyers aren't stupid. If there's legally-murky secret data sauce, it's firewalled from being easily seen in its entirety by anyone not golden-handcuffed to the company. They may be able to train against it. They may be able to peek at portions of it. But no one is downloading-all.
  - belter 3y ago
    Big corporations and corporate lawyers lose major lawsuits all the time.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      That doesn't mean they don't spend lots of time thinking of ways not to lose them. See: Google turning off retention on internal conversations to avoid creating anti-trust evidence
- alfiedotwtf 3y ago
  Why isn't robots.txt enough to enforce copyright etc? If NYT didn't set robots.txt properly, is their content free-for-all? Yes I know the first answer you would jump to is "of course not, copyright is the default", but it's almost 2024 and we have had robots.txt as industry de jure to stop crawling.
015a 3y ago
> a more established competitor Apple is already doing this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-publishers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-... Apple caught a lot of shit over the past 18 months for their lack of AI strategy; but I think two years from now they're going to look like geniuses.
- UrineSqueegee 3y ago
  didnt they just get caught for pantent infrigment? I'm sure they've done their fair share of shady stuff with the AI datasets too, they are just going to do a stellar job of conciling it.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Try searching for man or woman in your photos app. It won't even show it to me. It's lobotomized and has been for many years.
hackernewds 3y ago
So you're advocating giving open AI and incumbents a massive advantage by now delegitimizing the process? It's kinda like why Netflix was all for "fast lanes"
bnralt 3y ago
> Solidly 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.) Hacker News consistently have upvoted posts to let users circumvent paywalls. And even when it doesn't, conversations here (and on Twitter, Reddit, etc.) that summarize the articles and quote the relevant bits as soon as the articles are published are much more of a threat to The New York Times than ChatGPT training on articles from months/years ago.
- gosub100 3y ago
  I don't think it's about scraping being a threat. It's that they violated the TOS and stand to make a ton of money from someone else's work. I find irony in the newspaper suing AI when other news sources (admittedly not NYT) use AI to write the articles. How many other AI scrapers are just ingesting AI generated content?
  - Jensson 3y ago
    > I find irony in the newspaper suing AI when other news sources (admittedly not NYT) use AI to write the articles. That isn't ironic at all, newspapers have newspaper competitors and if those competitors can steal content by washing it through an AI that is a serious problem. If these AI models weren't used to produce news articles and similar then it would be a much smaller issue.
tracyhenry 3y ago
> the first being at the birth of modern search engines. Why do you say that? Search engines would at least direct the viewer to the source. NYT gets 35%+ of its traffic from Google: https://www.similarweb.com/website/nytimes.com/#traffic-sources https://www.similarweb.com/website/nytimes.com/#traffic-sour...
- belter 3y ago
  Just because they asked for forgiveness instead of asking first for permission, it's original sins will not be erased :-) "Google Agrees to Pay Canadian Media for Using Their Content" - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/world/americas/google-canada-news-media-deal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/world/americas/google-can...
  - realusername 3y ago
    That's why I think the newspapers will manage to win against the LLM companies. They won against Google despite having no real argument why they should get paid to get more traffic. The search engine tax is even a shakier concept than the LLM tax would be. Newspapers are very powerful and they own the platform to push their opinion. I'm not about to forget the EU debates where they all (or close to all) lied about how meta tags really work to push it their way, they've done it and they will do it again.
- kbos87 3y ago
  That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t theft of their content. The internet would be a very different place if creator compensation and low friction micropayments were some of the first principles. Instead we’re left with ads as the only viable monetization model and clickbait/misinformation as a side effect.
  - tracyhenry 3y ago
    I don't quite get it. If listing your link is considered as theft, HN is then a thief of content too. If you don't want your content stolen, just tell Google to not index your website? I guess it's more constructive to propose alternatives than just bashing the status quo. What's your creator compensation model for a search engine? I believe whatever being proposed is trading off something significant for being more ethic.
logicchains 3y ago
> 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. Eventually these LLMs are going to be put in mechanical bodies with the ability to interact with the world and learn (update their weights) in realtime. Consider how absurd your perspective would be then, when it'd be illegal for this embodied LLM to read any copyrighted text, be it a book or a web page, without special permission from the copyright holder, while humans face no such restriction.
- belter 3y ago
  A human faces the same restriction, if it provides commercial services on the internet creating code that is a copy of copyrighted code.
  - logicchains 3y ago
    This isn't true; if you hire a contractor and tell them "write from memory the copyrighted code X which you saw before", and they have such a good memory that they manage to write it verbatim, then you take that code and use it in a way that breaches copyright, you're liable, not the person you paid to copy the code for you. They're only liable if they were under NDA for that code.
    - belter 3y ago
      And what professional developer would not be under NDA for the code he produces for a corporation?
      - logicchains 3y ago
        The topic of this thread is LLMs reproducing _publicly available_ copyright content. Almost no developer would be under NDA for random copyrighted code online.
    - jeremyjh 3y ago
      > they have such a good memory that they manage to write it verbatim No, there is no clause in copyright law that says "unless someone remembered it all and copied it from their memory instead of directly from the original source." That would just be a different mechanism of copying. Clean-room techniques are used so that if there is incidental replication of parts of code in the course of a reimplementation of existing software, that it can be proven it was not copied from the source work.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
The world you’re hoping for will put all AI tech only within the hands of the established top 10 media entities, who traditionally have never compensated fairly anyway. Sorry but if that’s the alternative to some writers feeling slighted, I’ll choose for the writers to be sad and the tech to be free.
- kbos87 3y ago
  “Feeling slighted” is a gross understatement of how a lack of compensation flowing to creators has shaped the internet and the wider world over the past 25 years. If we have a problem with the way top media companies compensate their creators, that is a separate issue - not a justification for layering another issue on top.
  - graphe 3y ago
    YouTube had made way more content creators wealthy than the NYT. Writers are not going to be paid more after this ruling either way.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      Has the NYT made even a single content creator wealthy? Journalists there make less money than an average software engineer.
      - graphe 3y ago
        It's in the realm of possibility, lots of people found work post vox and buzzfeed too but i wouldn't classify it as the work of the NYT. "Real" creatives and content creators seem to embrace AI or at least grudgingly alter their own works, the OP I'm replying to would be cheering YouTube for suing openAI on the behalf of YouTubers everywhere, despite it having no bearing on reality. The main objectors are the old guard monopolies that are threatened.
        dinvlad 3y ago
ChatGTP 3y ago
Same, to all those arguing in favour of Open AI, I have a question, do you steal books, movies, games ? Do you illegally share them via torrents or even sell copies of these works ? Because that is what’s going on here?
michaelcampbell 3y ago
> they probably wouldn’t exist and the generative AI revolution may never have happened if they put the horse before the cart Maybe, but I find the "It's ok to break the law because otherwise I can't do what I want" narrative a little offputting.

by kbos87 3y ago

hackerlight 3y ago

Doesn't this harm open source ML by adding yet another costly barrier to training models?

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
It doesn't matter what's good for open source ML. It matters what is legal and what makes sense.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  Clearly 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 ago
  It matters what ends up being best for humanity, and I think there are cases to be made both ways on this
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - joquarky 3y ago
    People often get buried in the weeds about the purpose of copyright. Let us not forget that the only reason copyright laws exist is > 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 If copyright is starting to impede rather than promote progress, then it needs to change to remain constitutional.
    - tbrownaw 3y ago
      Do other countries all use the same reasoning?
      - MetaWhirledPeas 3y ago
        I don't think this was your point, but no they don't. Specifically China. What will happen if China has unbridled training for a decade while the United States quibbles about copyright? I think publications should be protected enough to keep them in business, so I don't really know what to make of this situation.
    - nsagent 3y ago
      The reason copyright promotes progress is that it incentives individuals and organizations to release works publicly, knowing their works are protected against unlawful copying. The end game when large content producers like The New York Times are squeezed due to copyright not being enforced is that they will become more draconian in their DRM measures. If you don't like paywalls now, watch out for what happens if a free-for-all is allowed for model training on copyrighted works without monetary compensation. I had a similar conversation with my brother-in-law who's an economist by training, but now works in data science. Initially he was in the side of OpenAI, said that model training data is fair game. After probing him, he came to the same conclusion I describe: not enforcing copyright for model training data will just result in a tightening of free access to data. We're already seeing it from the likes of Twitter/X and Reddit. That trend is likely to spread to more content-rich companies and get even more draconian as time goes on.
      - 3y ago
- z7 3y ago
  Slavery was legal...
  - belter 3y ago
    Still is in many countries with excellent diplomatic relations with the Western World: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-kafala-system https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-kafala-system
- shkkmo 3y ago
  The law on this does not currently exist. It is in the process of being created by the courts and legistatures. I personally think that giving copyright holders control over who is legally allowed to view a work that has been made publicly available is a huge step in the wrong direction. One of those reasons is open source, but really that argument applies just as well to making sure that smaller companies have a chance of competing. I think it makes much more sense to go after the infringing uses of models rather than putting in another barrier that will further advantage the big players in this space.
  - jrajav 3y ago
    Copyright holders already have control over who is legally allowed to view a work that has been made publicly available. It's the right to distribution. You don't waive that right when you make your content free to view on a trial basis to visitors to your site, with the intent of getting subscriptions - however easy your terms are to skirt. NYT has the right to remove any of their content at any time, and to bar others from hosting and profiting on the content.
  - rndmwlk 3y ago
    It’s disingenuous to frame using data to train a model as a “view,” of that data. The simple cases are the easy ones, if ChatGPT completely rips a NYT article then that’s obviously infringement; however, there’s an argument to be made that every part of the LLM training dataset is, in part, used in every output of that LLM. I don’t know the solution, but I don’t like the idea that anything I post online that is openly viewable is automatically opted into being part of ML/AI training data, and I imagine that opinion would be amplified if my writing was a product which was being directly threatened by the very same models.
    - bluefirebrand 3y ago
      All I can ever think about with how ML models work is that they sound an awful lot like Data Laundering schemes. You can get basically-but-not-quite-exactly the copyrighted material that it was trained on. Saw this a lot with some earlier image models where you could type in an artists name and get their work back. The fact that AI models are having to put up guardrails to prevent that sort of use is a good sign that they weren't trained ethically and they should be paying a ton of licensing fees to the people whose content they used without permission.
- soulofmischief 3y ago
  It doesn't matter what is legal. It matters what is right. Society is about balancing the needs of the individual vs the collective. I have a hard time equating individual rights with the NYT and I know my general views on scraping public data and who I was rooting for in the LinkedIn case.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - notahacker 3y ago
    I have an even harder time equating individual rights with the spending of $xx billion in Azure compute time and payment of a collective $0 to millions of individuals who involuntarily contribute training material to create a closed source, commercial service allowing a single company to compete with all the individuals currently employed to create similar work. NYT just happens to be an entity that can afford to fight Microsoft in court.
    - hackerlight 3y ago
      I don't see a problem as long as there's taxation. Look at SpaceX. They paid a collective $0 to the individuals who discovered all the physics and engineering knowledge. Without that knowledge they're nothing. But still, aren't we all glad that SpaceX exists? In exchange for all the knowledge that SpaceX is privatizing, we get to tax them. "You took from us, so we get to take it back with tax." I think the more important consideration isn't fairness it's prosperity. I don't want to ruin the gravy train with IP and copyright law. Let them take everything, then tax the end output in order to correct the balance and make things right.
  - jeremyjh 3y ago
    When we're discussing litigation, it certainly matters what is legal.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
      And also - if what is legal isn't right, we live in a democracy and should change that. Saying what's legal is irrelevant is an odd take. I like living in a place with a rule of law.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  setting legality as a cornerstone of ethics is a very slippery slope :)
bbor 3y ago
I think not, because stealing large amounts of unlicensed content and hoping momentum/bluster/secrecy protects you is a privilege afforded only to corporations. OSS seems to be developing its own, transparent, datasets.
pxoe 3y ago
open source won't care. they'll just use data anyway. closed/proprietary services that also monetize - there's a question whether it's "fair" to take and use data for free, and then basically resell access to it. the monetization aspect is the bigger rub than just data use. (maybe it's worth noting again that "openai" is not really "open" and not the same as open source ai/ml.) taking data, maybe it's data that's free to take, and then as freely distributing resulting work, that's really just fine. taking something for free (without distinction, maybe it's free, maybe it's supposed to stay free, maybe it's not supposed to be used like that, maybe it's copyrighted), and then just ignoring licenses/relicensing and monetizing without care, that's just a minefield.
layer8 3y ago
You can train your own model no problem, but you arguably can’t publish it. So yes, the model can’t be open-sourced, but the training procedure can.

theGnuMe 3y ago

It’s likely fair use.

JCM9 3y ago
Playing back large passages of verbatim content sold as your “product” without citation is almost certainly not fair use. Fair use would be saying “The New York Times said X” and then quoting a sentence with attribution. Thats not what OpenAI is being sued for. They’re being sued for passing off substantial bits of NYTimes content as their own IP and then charging for it saying it’s their own IP. This is also related to earlier studies about OpenAI where their models have a bad habit of just regurgitating training data verbatim. If your trained data is protected IP you didn’t secure the rights for then that’s a real big problem. Hence this lawsuit. If successful, the floodgates will open.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  At the root, it seems like there's also a gap in copyright with respect to AI around transformative. Is using something, in its entirety, as a tiny bit of a massive data set, in order to produce something novel... infringing? That's a pretty weird question that never existed when copyright was defined.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Replace the AI model by a human, and it should become pretty clear what is allowed and what isn’t, in terms of published output. The issue is that an AI model is like a human that you can force to produce copyright-infringing output, or at least where you have little control over whether the output is copyright-infringing or not.
    - bawolff 3y ago
      Its less clear than you think, and comes down more on how OpenAI is commercially benefiting and competiting with NYT than what they actually did. (See four factors of fair use)
  - 3y ago

belter 3y ago

For all the leaks on: Secret projects, novelty training algorithms not being published anymore so as to preserve market share, custom hardware, Q* learning, internal politics at companies at the forefront of state of the art LLMs...A thunderous silence is the lack of leaks, on the exact datasets used to train the main commercial LLMs. It is clear OpenAI or Google did not use only Common Crawl. With so many press conferences why did no research journalist ask yet from OpenAI or Google to confirm or deny if they use or used LibGen? Did OpenAI really bought an ebook of every publication from Cambridge Press, Oxford Press, Manning, APress, and so on? Did any of investors due diligence, include researching the legality of the content used for training?

ethbr1 3y ago
Would be fascinated to hear from someone inside on a throwaway, but my nearest experience is that corporate lawyers aren't stupid. If there's legally-murky secret data sauce, it's firewalled from being easily seen in its entirety by anyone not golden-handcuffed to the company. They may be able to train against it. They may be able to peek at portions of it. But no one is downloading-all.
- belter 3y ago
  Big corporations and corporate lawyers lose major lawsuits all the time.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    That doesn't mean they don't spend lots of time thinking of ways not to lose them. See: Google turning off retention on internal conversations to avoid creating anti-trust evidence
alfiedotwtf 3y ago
Why isn't robots.txt enough to enforce copyright etc? If NYT didn't set robots.txt properly, is their content free-for-all? Yes I know the first answer you would jump to is "of course not, copyright is the default", but it's almost 2024 and we have had robots.txt as industry de jure to stop crawling.

015a 3y ago

> a more established competitor Apple is already doing this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-publishers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-... Apple caught a lot of shit over the past 18 months for their lack of AI strategy; but I think two years from now they're going to look like geniuses.

UrineSqueegee 3y ago
didnt they just get caught for pantent infrigment? I'm sure they've done their fair share of shady stuff with the AI datasets too, they are just going to do a stellar job of conciling it.
- graphe 3y ago
  Try searching for man or woman in your photos app. It won't even show it to me. It's lobotomized and has been for many years.

hackernewds 3y ago

So you're advocating giving open AI and incumbents a massive advantage by now delegitimizing the process? It's kinda like why Netflix was all for "fast lanes"

bnralt 3y ago

> Solidly 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.) Hacker News consistently have upvoted posts to let users circumvent paywalls. And even when it doesn't, conversations here (and on Twitter, Reddit, etc.) that summarize the articles and quote the relevant bits as soon as the articles are published are much more of a threat to The New York Times than ChatGPT training on articles from months/years ago.

gosub100 3y ago
I don't think it's about scraping being a threat. It's that they violated the TOS and stand to make a ton of money from someone else's work. I find irony in the newspaper suing AI when other news sources (admittedly not NYT) use AI to write the articles. How many other AI scrapers are just ingesting AI generated content?
- Jensson 3y ago
  > I find irony in the newspaper suing AI when other news sources (admittedly not NYT) use AI to write the articles. That isn't ironic at all, newspapers have newspaper competitors and if those competitors can steal content by washing it through an AI that is a serious problem. If these AI models weren't used to produce news articles and similar then it would be a much smaller issue.

tracyhenry 3y ago

> the first being at the birth of modern search engines. Why do you say that? Search engines would at least direct the viewer to the source. NYT gets 35%+ of its traffic from Google: https://www.similarweb.com/website/nytimes.com/#traffic-sources https://www.similarweb.com/website/nytimes.com/#traffic-sour...

belter 3y ago
Just because they asked for forgiveness instead of asking first for permission, it's original sins will not be erased :-) "Google Agrees to Pay Canadian Media for Using Their Content" - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/world/americas/google-canada-news-media-deal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/world/americas/google-can...
- realusername 3y ago
  That's why I think the newspapers will manage to win against the LLM companies. They won against Google despite having no real argument why they should get paid to get more traffic. The search engine tax is even a shakier concept than the LLM tax would be. Newspapers are very powerful and they own the platform to push their opinion. I'm not about to forget the EU debates where they all (or close to all) lied about how meta tags really work to push it their way, they've done it and they will do it again.
kbos87 3y ago
That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t theft of their content. The internet would be a very different place if creator compensation and low friction micropayments were some of the first principles. Instead we’re left with ads as the only viable monetization model and clickbait/misinformation as a side effect.
- tracyhenry 3y ago
  I don't quite get it. If listing your link is considered as theft, HN is then a thief of content too. If you don't want your content stolen, just tell Google to not index your website? I guess it's more constructive to propose alternatives than just bashing the status quo. What's your creator compensation model for a search engine? I believe whatever being proposed is trading off something significant for being more ethic.

logicchains 3y ago

> 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. Eventually these LLMs are going to be put in mechanical bodies with the ability to interact with the world and learn (update their weights) in realtime. Consider how absurd your perspective would be then, when it'd be illegal for this embodied LLM to read any copyrighted text, be it a book or a web page, without special permission from the copyright holder, while humans face no such restriction.

belter 3y ago
A human faces the same restriction, if it provides commercial services on the internet creating code that is a copy of copyrighted code.
- logicchains 3y ago
  This isn't true; if you hire a contractor and tell them "write from memory the copyrighted code X which you saw before", and they have such a good memory that they manage to write it verbatim, then you take that code and use it in a way that breaches copyright, you're liable, not the person you paid to copy the code for you. They're only liable if they were under NDA for that code.
  - belter 3y ago
    And what professional developer would not be under NDA for the code he produces for a corporation?
    - logicchains 3y ago
      The topic of this thread is LLMs reproducing _publicly available_ copyright content. Almost no developer would be under NDA for random copyrighted code online.
  - jeremyjh 3y ago
    > they have such a good memory that they manage to write it verbatim No, there is no clause in copyright law that says "unless someone remembered it all and copied it from their memory instead of directly from the original source." That would just be a different mechanism of copying. Clean-room techniques are used so that if there is incidental replication of parts of code in the course of a reimplementation of existing software, that it can be proven it was not copied from the source work.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

The world you’re hoping for will put all AI tech only within the hands of the established top 10 media entities, who traditionally have never compensated fairly anyway. Sorry but if that’s the alternative to some writers feeling slighted, I’ll choose for the writers to be sad and the tech to be free.

kbos87 3y ago
“Feeling slighted” is a gross understatement of how a lack of compensation flowing to creators has shaped the internet and the wider world over the past 25 years. If we have a problem with the way top media companies compensate their creators, that is a separate issue - not a justification for layering another issue on top.
- graphe 3y ago
  YouTube had made way more content creators wealthy than the NYT. Writers are not going to be paid more after this ruling either way.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Has the NYT made even a single content creator wealthy? Journalists there make less money than an average software engineer.
    - graphe 3y ago
      It's in the realm of possibility, lots of people found work post vox and buzzfeed too but i wouldn't classify it as the work of the NYT. "Real" creatives and content creators seem to embrace AI or at least grudgingly alter their own works, the OP I'm replying to would be cheering YouTube for suing openAI on the behalf of YouTubers everywhere, despite it having no bearing on reality. The main objectors are the old guard monopolies that are threatened.
      - dinvlad 3y ago

ChatGTP 3y ago

Same, to all those arguing in favour of Open AI, I have a question, do you steal books, movies, games ? Do you illegally share them via torrents or even sell copies of these works ? Because that is what’s going on here?

michaelcampbell 3y ago

> they probably wouldn’t exist and the generative AI revolution may never have happened if they put the horse before the cart Maybe, but I find the "It's ok to break the law because otherwise I can't do what I want" narrative a little offputting.