10 ms·

I 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 go

I 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 ago
If the NYT goes under, why would its replacement fare any better?
- solardev 3y ago
  They'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 ago
  News 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.
  - charonn0 3y ago
    Honestly, this sounds like a conspiracy theory and/or an attempt to deflect criticism from the AI companies.
    - rand1239 3y ago
      Ohh. You think being owner of a company whose newspaper is read by hundreds of millions of people every day, doesn't put you in a position of power to control the society?
      - charonn0 3y ago
        I think I have better things to do than parse vague innuendo like that.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - Levitz 3y ago
      There is no conspiracy, that's the neat part, it's just how the system itself works. Media survives through advertising. Those who advertise dictate what gets shown and what doesn't, since if something inconvenient for them gets shown, they might not want to advertise there anymore, which means less money. It's the exact same thing that happens online, it's just more evident online than in traditional media. How come that even before Oct 7 Europe in general sided more with Palestine than with Israel, whereas it's the opposite for the US? Simple, Israel does a whole lot of lobbying in the US, which skews information in their favor. Calling this "brainwashing" is hyperbolic, but there is some truth to it.
aantix 3y ago
Why can't AI at least cite its source? This feels like a broader problem, nothing specific to the NYTimes. Long term, if no one is given credit for their research, either the creators will start to wall off their content or not create at all. Both options would be sad. A humane attribution comment from the AI could go a long way - "I think I read something about this <topic X> in the NYTimes <link> on January 3rd, 2021." It appears that without attribution, long term, nothing moves forward. AI loses access to the latest findings from humanity. And so does the public.
- make3 3y ago
  "Why can't AI at least cite its source" each article seen alters the weights a tiny, non-human understandable amount. it doesn't have a source, unless you think of the whole humongous corpus that it is trained on
  - aantix 3y ago
    We're trying to solve AGI but can't solve sources/citations?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - pxoe 3y ago
    that just sounds like "we didn't even try to build those systems in that way, and we're all out of ideas, so it basically will never work" which is really just a very, very common story with ai problems, be it sources/citations/licenses/usage tracking/etc., it's all just 'too complex if not impossible to solve', which just seems like a facade for intentionally ignoring those problems for benefit at this point. those problems definitely exist, why not try to solve them? because well...actually trying to solve them would entail having to use data properly and pay creators, and that'd just cut into bottom line. the point is free data use without having to pay, so why would they try to ruin that for themselves?
    - 3y ago
stronglikedan 3y ago
Why shouldn't the creators of the training content get anything for their efforts? With some guiderails in place to establish what is fair compensation, Fair Use can remain as-is.
- apantel 3y ago
  The issue as I see it is that every bit of data that the model ingested in training has affected what the model _is_ and therefore every token of output from the model has benefited from every token of input. When you receive anything from an LLM, you are essentially receiving a customized digest of all the training data. The second issue is that it takes an enormous amount of training data to train a model. In order to enable users to extract ‘anything’ from the model, the model has to be trained on ‘everything’. So I think these models should be looked at as public goods that consume everything and can produce anything. To have to keep a paper trail on the ‘everything’ part (the input) and send a continuous little trickle of capital to all of the sources is missing the point. That’s like a person having to pay a little bit of money to all of their teachers and mentors and everyone they’ve learned from every time they benefit from what they learned. OpenAI isn’t marching into the online news space and posting NY Times content verbatim in an effort to steal market share from the NY Times. OpenAI is in the business of turning ‘everything’ (input tokens) into ‘anything’ (output tokens). If someone manages to extract a preserved chunk of input tokens, that’s more like an interesting edge case of the model. It’s not what the model is in the business of doing. Edit: typo
  - vharuck 3y ago
    What's wrong with paying copyright holders, then? If OpenAI's models are so much more valuable than the sum of the individual inputs' values, why can't the company profit off that margin? >That’s like a person having to pay a little bit of money to all of their teachers and mentors and everyone they’ve learned from every time they benefit from what they learned. I could argue that public school teachers are paid by previous students. Not always the ones they taught, but still. But really, this is a very new facet of copyright law. It's a stretch to compare it with existing conventions, and really off to anthropomorphize LLMs by equating them to human students.
JW_00000 3y ago
The way I see it, if the NYT goes under (one of the biggest newspapers in the world), all similar outlets also go under. Major publishers, both of fiction and non-fiction, as well as images, video, and all other creative content, may also go under. Hence, there is no more (reliable) training data.
- solardev 3y ago
  I'm not sure whether that would even be a net loss, TBH. So much commercial media is crap, maybe it would be better for the profit motive to be removed? On the fiction side, there's plenty of fan-fic and indie productions. On the nonfiction side, many indie creators produce better content these days than the big media outlets do. And there still might be room for premium investigative stories done either by a few consolidated wire outlets (Reuters/APNews) or niche publishers (The Information, 404 Media, etc.). And then there's all the run-of-the-mill small-town journalism that AI would probably be even better at than human reporters: all the sports stories, the city council meetings, the environmental reviews... If AI makes commercial content publishing unviable, that might actually cut down on all the SEO spam and make the internet smaller and more local again, which would be a good thing IMO.
  - dogman144 3y ago
    Your ability to cleanly believe you’ve got a clear read on the challenges, solutions and outcomes from AI for the social/civil/corporate mess that is media, across small to large markets, and chalk it up to “silly IP battles,” is the daily reminder I need on why it was so wrong to give tech the driver’s seat from ~2010 onward.
    - solardev 3y ago
      I read your post several times but still am not sure if I'm reading it correctly. Are you saying the media landscape is more complex than AI can solve? If so, sure. I wasn't saying that. By "silly IP battles", I meant old guard media companies trying to sue AI out of existence just to defend their IP rather than trying to innovate. Not that different from what we saw with the RIAA and Napster. Somehow the music industry survived and there are more indie artists being discovered all the time. I don't think this is so much a battle of OpenAI vs NYT but whether copyright law has outlived its usefulness. I think so. If I misunderstood your reply completely, I apologize.
jonstewart 3y ago
Which dozen outlets can replace the New York Times overnight? I will stipulate that the NYT isn’t worthy of historic preservation if it’s become obsolete — but which dozen outlets can replace it? Wouldn’t those dozen outlets suffer the same harms of producing original content, costing time and talent, and while having a significant portion of the benefit accruing to downstream AI companies? If most of the benefit of producing original content accrues to the AI firms, won’t original content stop being produced? If original content stops being produced, how will AI models get better in the future?
- solardev 3y ago
  Just pick the top 12 articles/publishers out of a month of Google News, doesn't really matter. Most readers probably can't tell them apart anyway. Yes, all those outlets will suffer the same harms. They have been for decades. That's why there's so few remaining. Most are consolidated and produce worthless drivel now. Their business model doesn't really work in the modern era. Thankfully, people have and will continue to produce content even if much of it gets stolen -- as has happened for decades, if not millennia, before AI. If anything what we need is a better way to fund human creative endeavors not dependent on pay-per-view. That's got nothing to do with AI; AI just speeds up a process of decay that has been going on forever.
- visarga 3y ago
  > and while having a significant portion of the benefit accruing to downstream AI companies The main beneficiaries are not AI companies but AI users, who get tailored answers and help on demand. For OpenAI all tokens cost the same. BTW, I like to play a game - take a hefty chunk of text from this page (or a twitter debate) and ask "Write a 1000 word long, textbook quality article based off this text". You will be surprised how nice it comes out, and grounded.
junofan 3y ago
If the future of humanity rests on access to old NYT articles, we’re fucked. Why can’t OpenAI try to get a license if the NYT archives are so important to them?
- solardev 3y ago
  They're not. They can skip the entirety of the NYT archives and not much of value will be lost. The issue is with every copycat lawsuit that sues every AI company out of existence. It's a chilling effect on AI development. Old entrenched companies trying to prohibit new ways of learning and sharing information for the sake of their profit.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    Why don’t they train their AI on non-copyrighted material? It’s only fair for the copyright owners to want a share of the pie. I’d want one as well for my work.
    - snowstormsun 3y ago
      Because they wouldn't have enough good quality training data then probably.
      - lacrimacida 3y ago
        Too bad. Quality costs. Share the profits with everyone then and nobody would be unhappy
    - logicchains 3y ago
      >It’s only fair for the copyright owners to want a share of the pie. No it's not, it's pure greed. Everyone'd think it absurd if copyright holders dared to demand that any human who reads their publicly available text has to pay them a fee, but just because OpenAI are training a brain made of silicon instead of a brain made of carbon all the rent-seekers come out to try to take advantage.
melenaboija 3y ago
Why using authored NYT articles is “stupid IP battles” and having to pay for the trained model with them is not stupid?
- insanitybit 3y ago
  > Why using authored NYT articles is “stupid IP battles” When an AI uses information from an article it's no difference from me doing it in a blog post. If I'm just summarizing or referencing it, that's fair use, since that's my 'take' on the content. > having to pay for the trained model with them is not stupid? Because you can charge for anything you want. I can also charge for my summaries of NYT articles.
  - spopejoy 3y ago
    If you include entire paragraphs without citing, that's copyright violation, not fair use. If your blog was big enough to matter NYT would definitely sue. A human makes their own choices about what to disseminate, whereas these are singular for-profit services that anybody can query. The prompt injection attacks that reveal the original text show that the originals are retrievable, so if OpenAI et al cannot exchaustively prove that it will _never_ output copyrighted text without citation, then it's game over.
    - solardev 3y ago
      I don't think fair use is quite that black-and-white. There are many factors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors (from 17 USC 107: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title17/html/USCODE-2010-title17-chap1-sec107.htm https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title17/html...) > "[...] the fair use of a copyrighted work [...] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." ---- So here we have OpenAI, ostensibly a nonprofit, using portions of a copyrighted work for commenting on and educating (the prompting user), in a way that doesn't directly compete with NYT (nobody goes "Hey ChatGPT, what's today's news?"), not intentionally copying and publishing their materials (they have to specifically probe it to get it to spit out the copyrighted content). There's not a commercial intent to compete with the NYT's market. There is a subscription fee, but there is also tuition in private classrooms and that doesn't automatically make it a copyright violation. And citing the source or not doesn't really factor into copyright, that's just a politeness thing. I'm not a lawyer. It's just not that straightforward. But of course the court will decide, not us randos on the internet...
ngetchell 3y ago
"probably the single most important development in human history" is the kind of hyperbole you'd only find here. Better than medicine, agriculture, electrification, or music? That point of view simply does not jive with what I see so far from AI. It has had little impact beyond filling the internet with low-effort content. I feel like the crypto evangelists never got off the hype train. They just picked a new destination. I hope the NYT is compensated for the theft of their IP and hopefully more lawsuits follow.
- dkrich 3y ago
  Also the assumption a publication that’s been around for 150 years is disposable, not the web application that was created a year ago. I’ve been saying for a while that people’s credulity and impulse to believe absolutely any storyline related to technology is off the charts.
  - __loam 3y ago
    This is hackernews. Many people here work for startups and big tech companies. Their fortunes are tied to the perception that the technology they build is disruptive and valuable. They're not impartial.
  - fennecbutt 3y ago
    Been around for 150 years but I imagine the generations who it leans on are dying off. Nobody reads print media format anymore, we get our news elsewhere, for free and with varying political undertones, rather than the fixed one of a bought and paid for outlet. Keep in mind these guys play both sides of every field they cover in their "news".
- vivekd 3y ago
  I mean maybe not the single most important development, but definitely a very important technological development with the potential to revolutionize multiple industries
  - ngetchell 3y ago
asynchronous 3y ago
I agree that it’s more important than the NYT, I disagree that it’s the most important development in human history.
tacheiordache 3y ago
> we end up handicapping probably the single most important development in human history just to protect some ancient newspaper Single most important development in human history? Are you serious?
_jal 3y ago
I hope this results in OpenAI's code being released to everyone. This is way more important to humanity's future than any single software company. If OpenAI goes under, a dozen other outfits can replace them.
- solardev 3y ago
  That'd be great!! I'd love it for their models to be open-sourced and replaced by a community effort, like WikiAI or whatever.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
> if NYT goes under a dozen similar outlets can replace them overnight Not when there’s no money in journalism because the generative AIs immediately steal all content. If nyt goes under no one will be willing to start a news business as everyone will see it’s a money loser.
- tanseydavid 3y ago
  The NYT has been dying a slow death since long before ChatGPT came along.
- insanitybit 3y ago
  How does AI compete with journalism? AI doesn't do investigative reporting, AI can't even observe the world or send out reporters. Which part of journalism is AI going to impact most? Opinion pieces that contain no new information? Summarizing past events?
  - allturtles 3y ago
    Sadly, opinion pieces are what drives the news economy these days. Columnists/commentators, in effect, subsidize the hard news (at those venues that even bother to produce the latter). Filling their prime time hours with opinion journalism was the trick that Fox News discovered to become wildly successful.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    AI certainly isn’t a replacement for journalism, but that doesn’t mean journalism will continue to exist if no one pays for it. If everyone gets their news from chatGPT or the like there will be no investigative reporting. We’re already beginning to see this with most people reading the google/Facebook blurbs instead of clicking the link and giving ad money let alone paying.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      We're not just beginning to see it, it's already happened. It was enabled by digitized information, then amplified by the networking of the internet. The value of fresh information today is worth the price of a Google refresh, which for most people is effectively nothing. AI doesn't change that equation, and I'd argue it's overall impact on journalism will be less harmful than an ad-optimized economy or even the mere existence of YouTube. Quality journalism hasn't had a meaningful source of funding for a while, now. If AI does end up replacing honest-to-goodness investigative reporting, it'll be for the same reason the internet replaced the newspaper.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
octacat 3y ago
oh, sure. NYT could go, we could replace it with AI generated garbage with non-verifiable information without sources. AI changed the landscape. Google search would be working less reliable because real publishers would be hiding info behind the login (twitter/reddit). I.e. sites would be harder to index. There would be a lot of AI generated garbage which would be hard to filter out. AI generated review articles, AI generated news promoting someones agenda. Only to have a chatgpt which could randomly increase their price 100 times anytime in the future. There was outrage about Amazon removing DPReview site recently. But, it would be a common practice not to publish code/info, which could be used to train the model of another company. So, expect less open source projects, that companies just released because they were feeling like it could be good for everyone. Actually, there is the use case that NYT would become more influential and important, because if 99% of all info is generated by AI and search is not working anymore, we would have to rely on the trusted sources to get our info. In the world of garbage, we would have to have some sources of verifiable human-generated info.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> I hope this results in Fair Use being expanded to cover AI training. Couldn't disagree more strongly, and I hope the outcome is the exact opposite. I think we've already started to see the severe negative consequences when the lion's share of the profits get sucked up by very, very few entities (e.g. we used to have tons of local papers and other entities that made money through advertising, now Google and Facebook, and to a smaller extent Amazon, suck up the majority of that revenue). The idea that everyone else gets to toil to make the content but all the profits flow to the companies with the best AI tech is not a future that's going to end with the utopia vision AI boosters think it will.
- whichfawkes 3y ago
  Trying to prohibit this usage of information would not help prevent centralization of power and profit. All it would do is momentarily slow AI progress (which is fine), and allow OpenAI et al to pull the ladder up behind them (which fuels centralization of power and profit). By what mechanism do you think your desired outcome would prevent centralization of profit to the players who are already the largest?
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    I'm not saying copyright is without problems (e.g. there is no reason I think its protection should be as long as it is), but I think the opposite, where the incentive to create new content (especially in the case of news reporting) is completely killed because someone else gets to vacuum up all the profits, is worse. I mean, existing copyright does protect tons of independent writers, artists, etc. and prevents all of the profits from their output from being "sucked up" by a few entities. More critically, while fair use decisions are famously a judgement call, I think OpenAI will lose this based on the "effect of the fair use on the potential market" of the original content test. From https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ : > Another important fair use factor is whether your use deprives the copyright owner of income or undermines a new or potential market for the copyrighted work. Depriving a copyright owner of income is very likely to trigger a lawsuit. This is true even if you are not competing directly with the original work. > For example, in one case an artist used a copyrighted photograph without permission as the basis for wood sculptures, copying all elements of the photo. The artist earned several hundred thousand dollars selling the sculptures. When the photographer sued, the artist claimed his sculptures were a fair use because the photographer would never have considered making sculptures. The court disagreed, stating that it did not matter whether the photographer had considered making sculptures; what mattered was that a potential market for sculptures of the photograph existed. (Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992).) and especially > “The economic effect of a parody with which we are concerned is not its potential to destroy or diminish the market for the original—any bad review can have that effect—but whether it fulfills the demand for the original.” (Fisher v. Dees, 794 F.2d 432 (9th Cir. 1986).) The "whether it fulfills the demand of the original" is clearly where NYTimes has the best argument.
ahepp 3y ago
I know utilitarianism is a popular moral theory in hacker circles, but is it really appropriate to dispense with any other notion of justice? I don’t mean to go off on too deep of a tangent, but if one person’s (or even many people’s) idea of what’s good for humanity is the only consideration for what’s just, it seems clear that the result would be complete chaos. As it stands, it doesn’t seem to be an “either or” choice. Tech companies have a lot of money. It seems to me that an agreement that’s fundamentally sustainable and fits shared notions of fairness would probably involve some degree of payment. The alternative would be that these resources become inaccessible for LLM training, because they would need to put up a wall or they would go out of business.
- solardev 3y ago
  I don't know that "absolute utilitarianism", if such a thing could even exist, would make a sound moral framework; that sounds too much like a "tyranny of the majority" situation. Tech companies shouldn't make the rules. And they shouldn't be allowed to just do whatever they want. However, this isn't that. This is just a debate over intellectual property and copyright law. In this case it's the NYT vs OpenAI, last decade it was the RIAA vs Napster. I'm not much of a libertarian (in fact, I'd prefer a better central government), but I also don't believe IP should have as much protection as it does. I think copyright law is in need of a complete rewrite, and yes, utilitarianism and public use would be part of the consideration. If it were up to me I'd scrap the idea of private intellectual property altogether and publicly fund creative works and release them into the public domain, similar to how we treat creative works of the federal government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_t... Rather than capitalists competing to own ideas, grant-seekers would seek funding to pursue and further develop their ideas. No one would get rich off such a system, which is a side benefit in my eyes.
tsimionescu 3y ago
I think the exact opposite is true: as long as AI depends critically on scrupulous news media to be able to generate info about current events, it is far more important to protect the news media than the AI training models. OpenAI could survive even if it had to pay the NYT for redistributing their works. But OpenAI can't survive if no one is actually reporting news fairly accurately. And if the NYT were to go bankrupt, all smaller players would have gone under looooong before. In some far flung future where an AI can send agents to record and interpret events, and process news feeds and others to extract and corroborate information, this would greatly change. But probably in that world the OpenAI of those times wouldn't really bother training on NYT data at all.
DeIlliad 3y ago
> 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. Easy to grandstand when it is not your job on the line.
- solardev 3y ago
  Is it? My job as a frontend dev is similarly threatened by OpenAI, maybe even more so than journalists'. The very company I usually like to pay to help with my work (Vercel) is in the process of using that same money to replace me with AI as we speak, lol (https://vercel.com/blog/announcing-v0-generative-ui https://vercel.com/blog/announcing-v0-generative-ui). I'm not complaining. I think it's great progress, even if it'll make me obsolete soon. I was a journalism student in college, long before ML became a threat, and even then it was a dying industry. I chose not to enter it because the prospects were so bleak. Then a few months ago I actually tried to get a journalism job locally, but never heard back. The former reporter there also left because the pay wasn't enough for the costs of living in this area, but that had nothing to do with OpenAI. It's just a really tough industry. And even as a web dev, I knew it was only a matter of time before I became unnecessary. Whether it was Wordpress or SquareSpace or Skynet, it was bound to happen at some point. I'm going back to school now to try to enter another field altogether, in part because the writing is on the ~~wall~~ chatbox for us. I don't think we as a society owe it to any profession to artificially keep it alive as it's historically been. We do it owe it to INDIVIDUALS -- fellow citizens/residents -- to provide them with some way forward, but I'd prefer that be reskilling and social support programs, welfare if nothing else, rather than using ancient copyright law to favor old dying industries over new ones that can actually have a much bigger impact. In my eyes, the NYT is just another news outlet. A decent one, sure, but not anything substantially different than WaPo or the LA Times or whatever. How many Pulitzer winners have come and gone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Breaking_News_Reporting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Breaking_Ne... If we lost the NYT, it'd be a bit of nostalgia, but next week life would go on as usual. They're not even as specialized as, say, National Geographic or PopSci or The Information or 404 Media or The Center for Investigative Reporting, any of which would be harder to replace than another generic big news outlet. AI, meanwhile, has the potential to be way bigger than even the Internet, IMO, and we should be devoting Manhattan Project-like resources to it.
__loam 3y ago
I hope the nyt skullfucks this field. Humanity's future? You're doing statistics on stolen labor.

charonn0 3y ago

If the NYT goes under, why would its replacement fare any better?

solardev 3y ago
They'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 ago
News 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.
- charonn0 3y ago
  Honestly, this sounds like a conspiracy theory and/or an attempt to deflect criticism from the AI companies.
  - rand1239 3y ago
    Ohh. You think being owner of a company whose newspaper is read by hundreds of millions of people every day, doesn't put you in a position of power to control the society?
    - charonn0 3y ago
      I think I have better things to do than parse vague innuendo like that.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - Levitz 3y ago
    There is no conspiracy, that's the neat part, it's just how the system itself works. Media survives through advertising. Those who advertise dictate what gets shown and what doesn't, since if something inconvenient for them gets shown, they might not want to advertise there anymore, which means less money. It's the exact same thing that happens online, it's just more evident online than in traditional media. How come that even before Oct 7 Europe in general sided more with Palestine than with Israel, whereas it's the opposite for the US? Simple, Israel does a whole lot of lobbying in the US, which skews information in their favor. Calling this "brainwashing" is hyperbolic, but there is some truth to it.

aantix 3y ago

Why can't AI at least cite its source? This feels like a broader problem, nothing specific to the NYTimes. Long term, if no one is given credit for their research, either the creators will start to wall off their content or not create at all. Both options would be sad. A humane attribution comment from the AI could go a long way - "I think I read something about this <topic X> in the NYTimes <link> on January 3rd, 2021." It appears that without attribution, long term, nothing moves forward. AI loses access to the latest findings from humanity. And so does the public.

make3 3y ago
"Why can't AI at least cite its source" each article seen alters the weights a tiny, non-human understandable amount. it doesn't have a source, unless you think of the whole humongous corpus that it is trained on
- aantix 3y ago
  We're trying to solve AGI but can't solve sources/citations?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- pxoe 3y ago
  that just sounds like "we didn't even try to build those systems in that way, and we're all out of ideas, so it basically will never work" which is really just a very, very common story with ai problems, be it sources/citations/licenses/usage tracking/etc., it's all just 'too complex if not impossible to solve', which just seems like a facade for intentionally ignoring those problems for benefit at this point. those problems definitely exist, why not try to solve them? because well...actually trying to solve them would entail having to use data properly and pay creators, and that'd just cut into bottom line. the point is free data use without having to pay, so why would they try to ruin that for themselves?
  - 3y ago

stronglikedan 3y ago

Why shouldn't the creators of the training content get anything for their efforts? With some guiderails in place to establish what is fair compensation, Fair Use can remain as-is.

apantel 3y ago
The issue as I see it is that every bit of data that the model ingested in training has affected what the model _is_ and therefore every token of output from the model has benefited from every token of input. When you receive anything from an LLM, you are essentially receiving a customized digest of all the training data. The second issue is that it takes an enormous amount of training data to train a model. In order to enable users to extract ‘anything’ from the model, the model has to be trained on ‘everything’. So I think these models should be looked at as public goods that consume everything and can produce anything. To have to keep a paper trail on the ‘everything’ part (the input) and send a continuous little trickle of capital to all of the sources is missing the point. That’s like a person having to pay a little bit of money to all of their teachers and mentors and everyone they’ve learned from every time they benefit from what they learned. OpenAI isn’t marching into the online news space and posting NY Times content verbatim in an effort to steal market share from the NY Times. OpenAI is in the business of turning ‘everything’ (input tokens) into ‘anything’ (output tokens). If someone manages to extract a preserved chunk of input tokens, that’s more like an interesting edge case of the model. It’s not what the model is in the business of doing. Edit: typo
- vharuck 3y ago
  What's wrong with paying copyright holders, then? If OpenAI's models are so much more valuable than the sum of the individual inputs' values, why can't the company profit off that margin? >That’s like a person having to pay a little bit of money to all of their teachers and mentors and everyone they’ve learned from every time they benefit from what they learned. I could argue that public school teachers are paid by previous students. Not always the ones they taught, but still. But really, this is a very new facet of copyright law. It's a stretch to compare it with existing conventions, and really off to anthropomorphize LLMs by equating them to human students.

JW_00000 3y ago

The way I see it, if the NYT goes under (one of the biggest newspapers in the world), all similar outlets also go under. Major publishers, both of fiction and non-fiction, as well as images, video, and all other creative content, may also go under. Hence, there is no more (reliable) training data.

solardev 3y ago
I'm not sure whether that would even be a net loss, TBH. So much commercial media is crap, maybe it would be better for the profit motive to be removed? On the fiction side, there's plenty of fan-fic and indie productions. On the nonfiction side, many indie creators produce better content these days than the big media outlets do. And there still might be room for premium investigative stories done either by a few consolidated wire outlets (Reuters/APNews) or niche publishers (The Information, 404 Media, etc.). And then there's all the run-of-the-mill small-town journalism that AI would probably be even better at than human reporters: all the sports stories, the city council meetings, the environmental reviews... If AI makes commercial content publishing unviable, that might actually cut down on all the SEO spam and make the internet smaller and more local again, which would be a good thing IMO.
- dogman144 3y ago
  Your ability to cleanly believe you’ve got a clear read on the challenges, solutions and outcomes from AI for the social/civil/corporate mess that is media, across small to large markets, and chalk it up to “silly IP battles,” is the daily reminder I need on why it was so wrong to give tech the driver’s seat from ~2010 onward.
  - solardev 3y ago
    I read your post several times but still am not sure if I'm reading it correctly. Are you saying the media landscape is more complex than AI can solve? If so, sure. I wasn't saying that. By "silly IP battles", I meant old guard media companies trying to sue AI out of existence just to defend their IP rather than trying to innovate. Not that different from what we saw with the RIAA and Napster. Somehow the music industry survived and there are more indie artists being discovered all the time. I don't think this is so much a battle of OpenAI vs NYT but whether copyright law has outlived its usefulness. I think so. If I misunderstood your reply completely, I apologize.

jonstewart 3y ago

Which dozen outlets can replace the New York Times overnight? I will stipulate that the NYT isn’t worthy of historic preservation if it’s become obsolete — but which dozen outlets can replace it? Wouldn’t those dozen outlets suffer the same harms of producing original content, costing time and talent, and while having a significant portion of the benefit accruing to downstream AI companies? If most of the benefit of producing original content accrues to the AI firms, won’t original content stop being produced? If original content stops being produced, how will AI models get better in the future?

solardev 3y ago
Just pick the top 12 articles/publishers out of a month of Google News, doesn't really matter. Most readers probably can't tell them apart anyway. Yes, all those outlets will suffer the same harms. They have been for decades. That's why there's so few remaining. Most are consolidated and produce worthless drivel now. Their business model doesn't really work in the modern era. Thankfully, people have and will continue to produce content even if much of it gets stolen -- as has happened for decades, if not millennia, before AI. If anything what we need is a better way to fund human creative endeavors not dependent on pay-per-view. That's got nothing to do with AI; AI just speeds up a process of decay that has been going on forever.
visarga 3y ago
> and while having a significant portion of the benefit accruing to downstream AI companies The main beneficiaries are not AI companies but AI users, who get tailored answers and help on demand. For OpenAI all tokens cost the same. BTW, I like to play a game - take a hefty chunk of text from this page (or a twitter debate) and ask "Write a 1000 word long, textbook quality article based off this text". You will be surprised how nice it comes out, and grounded.

junofan 3y ago

If the future of humanity rests on access to old NYT articles, we’re fucked. Why can’t OpenAI try to get a license if the NYT archives are so important to them?

solardev 3y ago
They're not. They can skip the entirety of the NYT archives and not much of value will be lost. The issue is with every copycat lawsuit that sues every AI company out of existence. It's a chilling effect on AI development. Old entrenched companies trying to prohibit new ways of learning and sharing information for the sake of their profit.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  Why don’t they train their AI on non-copyrighted material? It’s only fair for the copyright owners to want a share of the pie. I’d want one as well for my work.
  - snowstormsun 3y ago
    Because they wouldn't have enough good quality training data then probably.
    - lacrimacida 3y ago
      Too bad. Quality costs. Share the profits with everyone then and nobody would be unhappy
  - logicchains 3y ago
    >It’s only fair for the copyright owners to want a share of the pie. No it's not, it's pure greed. Everyone'd think it absurd if copyright holders dared to demand that any human who reads their publicly available text has to pay them a fee, but just because OpenAI are training a brain made of silicon instead of a brain made of carbon all the rent-seekers come out to try to take advantage.

melenaboija 3y ago

Why using authored NYT articles is “stupid IP battles” and having to pay for the trained model with them is not stupid?

insanitybit 3y ago
> Why using authored NYT articles is “stupid IP battles” When an AI uses information from an article it's no difference from me doing it in a blog post. If I'm just summarizing or referencing it, that's fair use, since that's my 'take' on the content. > having to pay for the trained model with them is not stupid? Because you can charge for anything you want. I can also charge for my summaries of NYT articles.
- spopejoy 3y ago
  If you include entire paragraphs without citing, that's copyright violation, not fair use. If your blog was big enough to matter NYT would definitely sue. A human makes their own choices about what to disseminate, whereas these are singular for-profit services that anybody can query. The prompt injection attacks that reveal the original text show that the originals are retrievable, so if OpenAI et al cannot exchaustively prove that it will _never_ output copyrighted text without citation, then it's game over.
  - solardev 3y ago
    I don't think fair use is quite that black-and-white. There are many factors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors (from 17 USC 107: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title17/html/USCODE-2010-title17-chap1-sec107.htm https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title17/html...) > "[...] the fair use of a copyrighted work [...] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." ---- So here we have OpenAI, ostensibly a nonprofit, using portions of a copyrighted work for commenting on and educating (the prompting user), in a way that doesn't directly compete with NYT (nobody goes "Hey ChatGPT, what's today's news?"), not intentionally copying and publishing their materials (they have to specifically probe it to get it to spit out the copyrighted content). There's not a commercial intent to compete with the NYT's market. There is a subscription fee, but there is also tuition in private classrooms and that doesn't automatically make it a copyright violation. And citing the source or not doesn't really factor into copyright, that's just a politeness thing. I'm not a lawyer. It's just not that straightforward. But of course the court will decide, not us randos on the internet...

ngetchell 3y ago

"probably the single most important development in human history" is the kind of hyperbole you'd only find here. Better than medicine, agriculture, electrification, or music? That point of view simply does not jive with what I see so far from AI. It has had little impact beyond filling the internet with low-effort content. I feel like the crypto evangelists never got off the hype train. They just picked a new destination. I hope the NYT is compensated for the theft of their IP and hopefully more lawsuits follow.

dkrich 3y ago
Also the assumption a publication that’s been around for 150 years is disposable, not the web application that was created a year ago. I’ve been saying for a while that people’s credulity and impulse to believe absolutely any storyline related to technology is off the charts.
- __loam 3y ago
  This is hackernews. Many people here work for startups and big tech companies. Their fortunes are tied to the perception that the technology they build is disruptive and valuable. They're not impartial.
- fennecbutt 3y ago
  Been around for 150 years but I imagine the generations who it leans on are dying off. Nobody reads print media format anymore, we get our news elsewhere, for free and with varying political undertones, rather than the fixed one of a bought and paid for outlet. Keep in mind these guys play both sides of every field they cover in their "news".
vivekd 3y ago
I mean maybe not the single most important development, but definitely a very important technological development with the potential to revolutionize multiple industries
- ngetchell 3y ago

asynchronous 3y ago

I agree that it’s more important than the NYT, I disagree that it’s the most important development in human history.

tacheiordache 3y ago

> we end up handicapping probably the single most important development in human history just to protect some ancient newspaper Single most important development in human history? Are you serious?

_jal 3y ago

I hope this results in OpenAI's code being released to everyone. This is way more important to humanity's future than any single software company. If OpenAI goes under, a dozen other outfits can replace them.

solardev 3y ago
That'd be great!! I'd love it for their models to be open-sourced and replaced by a community effort, like WikiAI or whatever.

HDThoreaun 3y ago

> if NYT goes under a dozen similar outlets can replace them overnight Not when there’s no money in journalism because the generative AIs immediately steal all content. If nyt goes under no one will be willing to start a news business as everyone will see it’s a money loser.

tanseydavid 3y ago
The NYT has been dying a slow death since long before ChatGPT came along.
insanitybit 3y ago
How does AI compete with journalism? AI doesn't do investigative reporting, AI can't even observe the world or send out reporters. Which part of journalism is AI going to impact most? Opinion pieces that contain no new information? Summarizing past events?
- allturtles 3y ago
  Sadly, opinion pieces are what drives the news economy these days. Columnists/commentators, in effect, subsidize the hard news (at those venues that even bother to produce the latter). Filling their prime time hours with opinion journalism was the trick that Fox News discovered to become wildly successful.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  AI certainly isn’t a replacement for journalism, but that doesn’t mean journalism will continue to exist if no one pays for it. If everyone gets their news from chatGPT or the like there will be no investigative reporting. We’re already beginning to see this with most people reading the google/Facebook blurbs instead of clicking the link and giving ad money let alone paying.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    We're not just beginning to see it, it's already happened. It was enabled by digitized information, then amplified by the networking of the internet. The value of fresh information today is worth the price of a Google refresh, which for most people is effectively nothing. AI doesn't change that equation, and I'd argue it's overall impact on journalism will be less harmful than an ad-optimized economy or even the mere existence of YouTube. Quality journalism hasn't had a meaningful source of funding for a while, now. If AI does end up replacing honest-to-goodness investigative reporting, it'll be for the same reason the internet replaced the newspaper.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

octacat 3y ago

oh, sure. NYT could go, we could replace it with AI generated garbage with non-verifiable information without sources. AI changed the landscape. Google search would be working less reliable because real publishers would be hiding info behind the login (twitter/reddit). I.e. sites would be harder to index. There would be a lot of AI generated garbage which would be hard to filter out. AI generated review articles, AI generated news promoting someones agenda. Only to have a chatgpt which could randomly increase their price 100 times anytime in the future. There was outrage about Amazon removing DPReview site recently. But, it would be a common practice not to publish code/info, which could be used to train the model of another company. So, expect less open source projects, that companies just released because they were feeling like it could be good for everyone. Actually, there is the use case that NYT would become more influential and important, because if 99% of all info is generated by AI and search is not working anymore, we would have to rely on the trusted sources to get our info. In the world of garbage, we would have to have some sources of verifiable human-generated info.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

> I hope this results in Fair Use being expanded to cover AI training. Couldn't disagree more strongly, and I hope the outcome is the exact opposite. I think we've already started to see the severe negative consequences when the lion's share of the profits get sucked up by very, very few entities (e.g. we used to have tons of local papers and other entities that made money through advertising, now Google and Facebook, and to a smaller extent Amazon, suck up the majority of that revenue). The idea that everyone else gets to toil to make the content but all the profits flow to the companies with the best AI tech is not a future that's going to end with the utopia vision AI boosters think it will.

whichfawkes 3y ago
Trying to prohibit this usage of information would not help prevent centralization of power and profit. All it would do is momentarily slow AI progress (which is fine), and allow OpenAI et al to pull the ladder up behind them (which fuels centralization of power and profit). By what mechanism do you think your desired outcome would prevent centralization of profit to the players who are already the largest?
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I'm not saying copyright is without problems (e.g. there is no reason I think its protection should be as long as it is), but I think the opposite, where the incentive to create new content (especially in the case of news reporting) is completely killed because someone else gets to vacuum up all the profits, is worse. I mean, existing copyright does protect tons of independent writers, artists, etc. and prevents all of the profits from their output from being "sucked up" by a few entities. More critically, while fair use decisions are famously a judgement call, I think OpenAI will lose this based on the "effect of the fair use on the potential market" of the original content test. From https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ : > Another important fair use factor is whether your use deprives the copyright owner of income or undermines a new or potential market for the copyrighted work. Depriving a copyright owner of income is very likely to trigger a lawsuit. This is true even if you are not competing directly with the original work. > For example, in one case an artist used a copyrighted photograph without permission as the basis for wood sculptures, copying all elements of the photo. The artist earned several hundred thousand dollars selling the sculptures. When the photographer sued, the artist claimed his sculptures were a fair use because the photographer would never have considered making sculptures. The court disagreed, stating that it did not matter whether the photographer had considered making sculptures; what mattered was that a potential market for sculptures of the photograph existed. (Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992).) and especially > “The economic effect of a parody with which we are concerned is not its potential to destroy or diminish the market for the original—any bad review can have that effect—but whether it fulfills the demand for the original.” (Fisher v. Dees, 794 F.2d 432 (9th Cir. 1986).) The "whether it fulfills the demand of the original" is clearly where NYTimes has the best argument.

ahepp 3y ago

I know utilitarianism is a popular moral theory in hacker circles, but is it really appropriate to dispense with any other notion of justice? I don’t mean to go off on too deep of a tangent, but if one person’s (or even many people’s) idea of what’s good for humanity is the only consideration for what’s just, it seems clear that the result would be complete chaos. As it stands, it doesn’t seem to be an “either or” choice. Tech companies have a lot of money. It seems to me that an agreement that’s fundamentally sustainable and fits shared notions of fairness would probably involve some degree of payment. The alternative would be that these resources become inaccessible for LLM training, because they would need to put up a wall or they would go out of business.

solardev 3y ago
I don't know that "absolute utilitarianism", if such a thing could even exist, would make a sound moral framework; that sounds too much like a "tyranny of the majority" situation. Tech companies shouldn't make the rules. And they shouldn't be allowed to just do whatever they want. However, this isn't that. This is just a debate over intellectual property and copyright law. In this case it's the NYT vs OpenAI, last decade it was the RIAA vs Napster. I'm not much of a libertarian (in fact, I'd prefer a better central government), but I also don't believe IP should have as much protection as it does. I think copyright law is in need of a complete rewrite, and yes, utilitarianism and public use would be part of the consideration. If it were up to me I'd scrap the idea of private intellectual property altogether and publicly fund creative works and release them into the public domain, similar to how we treat creative works of the federal government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_t... Rather than capitalists competing to own ideas, grant-seekers would seek funding to pursue and further develop their ideas. No one would get rich off such a system, which is a side benefit in my eyes.

tsimionescu 3y ago

I think the exact opposite is true: as long as AI depends critically on scrupulous news media to be able to generate info about current events, it is far more important to protect the news media than the AI training models. OpenAI could survive even if it had to pay the NYT for redistributing their works. But OpenAI can't survive if no one is actually reporting news fairly accurately. And if the NYT were to go bankrupt, all smaller players would have gone under looooong before. In some far flung future where an AI can send agents to record and interpret events, and process news feeds and others to extract and corroborate information, this would greatly change. But probably in that world the OpenAI of those times wouldn't really bother training on NYT data at all.

DeIlliad 3y ago

> 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. Easy to grandstand when it is not your job on the line.

solardev 3y ago
Is it? My job as a frontend dev is similarly threatened by OpenAI, maybe even more so than journalists'. The very company I usually like to pay to help with my work (Vercel) is in the process of using that same money to replace me with AI as we speak, lol (https://vercel.com/blog/announcing-v0-generative-ui https://vercel.com/blog/announcing-v0-generative-ui). I'm not complaining. I think it's great progress, even if it'll make me obsolete soon. I was a journalism student in college, long before ML became a threat, and even then it was a dying industry. I chose not to enter it because the prospects were so bleak. Then a few months ago I actually tried to get a journalism job locally, but never heard back. The former reporter there also left because the pay wasn't enough for the costs of living in this area, but that had nothing to do with OpenAI. It's just a really tough industry. And even as a web dev, I knew it was only a matter of time before I became unnecessary. Whether it was Wordpress or SquareSpace or Skynet, it was bound to happen at some point. I'm going back to school now to try to enter another field altogether, in part because the writing is on the ~~wall~~ chatbox for us. I don't think we as a society owe it to any profession to artificially keep it alive as it's historically been. We do it owe it to INDIVIDUALS -- fellow citizens/residents -- to provide them with some way forward, but I'd prefer that be reskilling and social support programs, welfare if nothing else, rather than using ancient copyright law to favor old dying industries over new ones that can actually have a much bigger impact. In my eyes, the NYT is just another news outlet. A decent one, sure, but not anything substantially different than WaPo or the LA Times or whatever. How many Pulitzer winners have come and gone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Breaking_News_Reporting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Breaking_Ne... If we lost the NYT, it'd be a bit of nostalgia, but next week life would go on as usual. They're not even as specialized as, say, National Geographic or PopSci or The Information or 404 Media or The Center for Investigative Reporting, any of which would be harder to replace than another generic big news outlet. AI, meanwhile, has the potential to be way bigger than even the Internet, IMO, and we should be devoting Manhattan Project-like resources to it.

__loam 3y ago

I hope the nyt skullfucks this field. Humanity's future? You're doing statistics on stolen labor.