76 ms·

NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances

• kazinator 3y ago
  Should be: "NY Times wants OpenÄI to delete all GPT instances". You wouldn't want the hapless rabble misreading it as an "aiii" diphthong.
  • hoppyhoppy2 3y ago
    Are you confusing the New York Times with the New Yorker?
• biglyburrito 3y ago
  TLDR: "The suit seeks nothing less than the erasure of both any GPT instances that the parties have trained using material from the Times, as well as the destruction of the datasets that were used for the training. It also asks for a permanent injunction to prevent similar conduct in the future. The Times also wants money, lots and lots of money: "statutory damages, compensatory damages, restitution, disgorgement, and any other relief that may be permitted by law or equity.""
  • downWidOutaFite 3y ago
    Wow they want to kill it. I wonder if we've just lived through the golden Napster era of LLMs.
    • readthenotes1 3y ago
      Just train on NYT articles no longer in copyright. We may be better for it.
      • mynegation 3y ago
        Next thing you know ChatGPT gives you the best way to crank your automobile and take good care of your crinoline.
      • vidarh 3y ago
        Or buy them. OpenAI market cap is many times NYT. If we see court judgements start to go copyright owners way, we will also see a scramble from AI companies to buy the few publishers with enough data to be worth buying, and to create works for hire to replace the rest. In the long run a copyright ruling like that will be a boon for OpenAI and all other players with deep enough pockets to do so, and massively harm everyone else who will suddenly find it far harder to build models legally.
      • rhdunn 3y ago
        So that would mean articles from the 1920s, provided that the authors of those articles have been dead for 70 years, or longer in some other countries.
    • suby 3y ago
      They may just want a licensing deal.
      • weikju 3y ago
        They're already working on it with Apple (see my other reply in this discussion), so I wouldn't doubt that this is another salvo in the same battle.
  • chongli 3y ago
    This is what lawyers are paid for. They ask for the max because there’s no harm in doing so. Everyone knows there’s little meaning to that.
    • greggsy 3y ago
      They always go for the max, knowing that they will settle somewhere closer to the expected rate.
• weikju 3y ago
  Probably has something to do with impending deals between NYT and major companies, e.g. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-publishers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/22/24012730/apple-ai-models-news-publishers https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/22/24012730/apple-ai-models...
• outside1234 3y ago
  Seems reasonable - they probably broke the TOS of the site
  • thallium205 3y ago
    What if they OCR’d the newspapers? No ToS there.
    • steve1977 3y ago
      I’m pretty sure there is still a copyright also for the physical newspaper.
      • pyuser583 3y ago
        For the paper or the author? What exactly was the licensing agreement for Op-Ed authors in 1962?
        • bloppe 3y ago
          Read the article. It's not difficult to get ChatGPT to regurgitate recent, obviously copyrighted articles, verbatim.
          • thallium205 3y ago
            It will be equally easy for ChatGPT to rewrite copyrighted content that makes the output materially different for a copyright claim to succeed also.
            • bloppe 3y ago
              Then ChatGPT should do that.
    • product-render 3y ago
      It's at least partially a copyright claim, isn't it? So the method -- OCR or scraping -- doesn't matter, I think.
• atleastoptimal 3y ago
  It's obviously a frivolous suit that will only net at best a ceremonial victory for NYTimes: 8 figure max payout and a promise to not use NYtimes material in the future. The trajectory and value to society of OpenAI vs NYtimes could not be greater. They have won no favors in the court of public opinion with their frequent misinformation. It's all just a big waste of time, the last of the old guard flailing against the march of progress. And even hypothetially if they managed to get OpenAI to delete ChatGPT they'd be hated forever.
  • 15457345234 3y ago
    > They have won no favors in the court of public opinion with their frequent misinformation. You mean GPT here, right?
    • atleastoptimal 3y ago
      ChatGPT only advertises itself as a fancy autocomplete. There is a disclaimer that it may produce output that appears correct but isn't. NYtimes written material purports itself to be the truth, thus shouldn't be held to the same standards as a generative AI obviously.
      • 15457345234 3y ago
        I think what we should focus on is the volume of misinformation in general, not the provenance of it. The NYT may produce misinformation but it aims not to, and its staff of human writers are limited in the quantity that they can produce. They also publish corrections. GPT enables anyone who can pay to generate a virtually unlimited volume of misinformation, launder it into 'articles' with fake bylines and saturate the internet with garbage. I think we need to focus on the damage done.
        • decremental 3y ago
          [dead]
        • 3y ago
• strangus 3y ago
  Next up, Microsoft acquires the New York Times forming MSNYT
  • playingalong 3y ago
    ... New Roman
  • unsupp0rted 3y ago
    This is not impossible, and perhaps not even unlikely
• sackfield 3y ago
  Something I have wondered about LLMs and training data is the idea that the biggest content producers on the internet now have their world view and tone echoed disproportionately as part of the next big wave of technology. This is incredibly impactful (although admittedly I don't know how to turn that into a profit). Is there some long term impact of removing the New York Times from training data that means it won't be part of the LLMs corpus going forward that is unforeseen?
• cycrutchfield 3y ago
  I read a NYT article and publish a summary of facts that I learned: totally legit. Train a model on NYT text that outputs a summary of facts that it learned: OMG literally murder.
  • up2isomorphism 3y ago
    That's why there will be a legalization of the fair use. Just let your intellectual to be used for free training material is not sustainable. Also remember copyright laws was not there in the first place.
  • zozbot234 3y ago
    Because it's not just summarizing the bare facts. It's a parrot.
  • bad_user 3y ago
    Fair use is intended for humans, much like copyright in general. If you can't copyright AI-generated pieces, then why would fair use apply to LLMs?
    • mdekkers 3y ago
      > Fair use is intended for humans. Is it? Can you quote relevant legislation or case law?
  • bloppe 3y ago
    Sounds like you didn't read the article. Here's a better synoposis: I read a NYT article and publish an exact copy of that article on my website: copyright infringement. Train a model on NYT text and it outputs an exact copy of that text: also copyright infringement.
    • cycrutchfield 3y ago
      So presumably when they fix that issue (which, if the text matches exactly, should be trivially easy) then would you accept that as a sufficient remedy?
• aurareturn 3y ago
  Companies that have content all see dollar signs. NYT won't mind if you use their content to train LLMs - as long as they get a commission. Reddit will shut down their free API and make you pay to get training content. Discord is going to be selling content for AI training too - if they haven't already done so. Twitter is doing it. They didn't care before because LLMs were just experiments. Now we're talking trillions of dollars of value.
  • MuffinFlavored 3y ago
    > They didn't care before because LLMs were just experiments. Now we're talking trillions of dollars of value. Can you make the argument this was their fault for not having forward vision/being asleep at the wheel and "accidentally, in hindsight" letting OpenAI/others have free, open, unlimited access to their content?
    • bloppe 3y ago
      Basically none of the training material for GPT was used under an "unlimited" license. There are very important legal limitations. GPT just doesn't care much about them.
    • aurareturn 3y ago
      No, I can't. It's just an observation with no personal opinion.
  • up2isomorphism 3y ago
    "They" also include the people working there. Why someone work with full time writing articles should give the work for free just let someone to train it and make money out of it as a consequence?
    • tucnak 3y ago
      >Why someone work with full time writing articles should give the work for free They are not giving it out "for free", in fact they're being paid by their employer to write these articles. Moreover, the writers themselves stand noth' to gain from their past writings financially as they don't belong to the ownership structure of the business.
• fasterik 3y ago
  I've been arguing since ChatGPT came out that LLMs should fall under fair use as a "transformative work". I'm not a lawyer and this is just my non-expert opinion, but it will be interesting to see what the legal system has to say about this.
  • mynegation 3y ago
    Suit claims that GPT reproduced passages from NYT almost verbatim.
    • rvz 3y ago
      Precisely. This tired 'fair use' excuses from AI bros whilst the GPT has reproduced the article text verbatim, word for word and it being monetized without the permission from the copyright holder and source (NYT) is an obvious copyright violation 101. Full stop. Again, just like Getty v. Stability, this copyright lawsuit will end in a licensing deal. Apple played it smart with their choice with licensing deals to train their GPT [0]. But this time, OpenAI knew they could get a license to train on NYT articles but chose not to. [0] https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/22/apple-wants-to-train-its-ai-with-50-million-worth-of-licensed-news-articles/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/22/apple-wants-to-train-its-ai-w...
      • chatmasta 3y ago
        > AI bros What (or whom) do you consider to be an "AI bro?" This sort of ad hominem generalization usually accompanies a weak argument.
        • satvikpendem 3y ago
          It seems to be used by people who've previously used the term "tech bro."
        • irq 3y ago
          Not saying I agree with this labeling, but it means approximately the same thing as “crypto bro”, but for AI
• groceryheist 3y ago
  The suit demonstrates instances where ChatGTP / Bing Copilot copy from the NYT verbatim. I think it is hard to argue that such copying constitutes "fair use". However, OAI/MS should be able to fix this within the current paradigm: Just learn to recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF. However, the suit goes far beyond claiming that such copying violates their copyright: "Unauthorized copying of Times Works without payment to train LLMs is a substitutive use that is not justified by any transformative purpose." This is a strong claim that just downloading articles into training data is what violates the copyright. That GTP outputs verbatim copies is a red herring. Hopefully the judge(s) will notice and direct focus on the interesting, high-stakes, and murky legal issues raised when we ask: What about a model can (or can't) be "transformative"?
  • spacecadet 3y ago
    Transformations are happening. Maybe if the output is verbatim afterwards, than that says something about the outputs originality all along... or am I a troll?
    • jarrell_mark 3y ago
      Anything + 2 and then minus two is back to the original thing. This says more about the transformations than the source material.
      • spacecadet 3y ago
        I know, I was trying to be funny, but hey- this community...
    • dathery 3y ago
      They're talking about transformative with regard to copyright law where it is an important part of determining fair use, not the dictionary definition you're using here. I can't take NY Times articles, translate them into Spanish, and then sell the translations under fair use, even though clearly I've transformed the original article content.
  • 3y ago
• kragen 3y ago
  this was predicted in the very influential epic 2014 video in 02004 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s (the original is flash and has thus been consigned to the memory hole, so we are left with this poor-quality conversion) 36": 'however, the press as you know it has ceased to exist' 40": '20th-century news organizations are an afterthought; a lonely remnant of a not-too-distant past' 2'11": 'also in 2002, google launches google news, a news portal. news organizations cry foul. google news is edited entirely by computers' 5'13": 'the news wars of 2010 are notable for the fact that no actual news organizations take part. googlezon finally checkmates microsoft with a feature the software giant cannot match: using a new algorithm, googlezon's computers construct new stories, dynamically stripping sentences and facts from all content sources, and recombining them. the computer writes a new story for every user' 5'55": 'in 2011 the slumbering fourth estate awakes to make its first and final stand. the new york times company sues googlezon, claiming that the company's fact-stripping robots are a violation of copyright law. the case goes all the way to the supreme court' they didn't get the details exactly right, but overall the accuracy is astounding however, that may be a hyperstition artifact in this timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIC_2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIC_2014 (i thought epic 2014 might be the only flash video to hae a wikipedia article about it, but then i looked and found five others)
• altals2023 3y ago
  Won't hold in court. GPT is a platform mainly providing answer to private individuals asking. Is like you ask a professor a question and he answered verbatim what copyrighted materials available (due to photographic memory) word for word back to you. Now if you take this answer and write a book or publish enmass on blogs for example, then you are the one should be sued by NYT. If GPT use the exact same wordings and publish it out to evetyone visiting their page, then that is on OpenAI.
  • Vegenoid 3y ago
    If said professor offered a service where anyone could ask them for information that is behind a paywall, and they provided it without significant transformation, this would certainly be copyright infringement that the copyright holder would have every right and motivation to take action against.
    • gedy 3y ago
      Professors are largely behind a paywall
    • elashri 3y ago
      I think the scale only matters here (probably). Because I will find it hard that a teacher/professor will not be allowed to setup a service where they will teach and provide their knowledge for others. That is basically the concept of teaching. Of course until LLM, we never had this scale before. Millions of potential learners vs the normal hundreds in a classroom session. So that makes the new case interesting
      • toyg 3y ago
        "Teaching" by copying source books word for word, would be copyright infringement; see, for example, the well-known issues around photocopying books or even excerpts. Also lying on source materials (e.g. telling students that some respected historian denies the Holocaust happened, when it's obviously not the case) is not "teaching" - it's defamation, and the NYT is absolutely right to pursue that angle too. Using LLMs as general-purpose search engines is a minefield, I would not be surprised if the practice disappeared in the next 20 years. Obviously the tech is here to stay, there is no problem when it's applied to augmenting niche work; but as a Google replacement, it has so many issues
• ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  [dupe] Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941
  • kristianp 3y ago
    True, the Verge article was posted here earlier.
• tarruda 3y ago
  Would be funny if NT Times won this and all commercial LLMs were shut down. Then LLMs would be distributed only via torrents, like most copyright infringing media.
  • __loam 3y ago
    Making these things anathema to commercial interests and making training them at scale legally perilous would be a huge win.
    • mdekkers 3y ago
      > making training them at scale legally perilous would be a huge win. Why?
      • fsckboy 3y ago
        I have no idea what he's thinking, but if everybody in the community here had an LLM in their pocket and large orgs did not, it would at least be kind of fun.
      • __loam 3y ago
        The open source people can continue to pretend they matter in this field and large corporations like Microsoft will stop stealing everything that moves on the internet.
      • anonymousab 3y ago
        Because the megacorps should have to pay the people creating the works they are training their multibillion/eventual multitrillion dollar systems on, and should get a nice rake to the face when they try to do an end run around it.
    • StableAlkyne 3y ago
      A huge win for countries with lax copyright laws. These things aren't going away, the worst case scenario would be exactly that scenario playing out - then China (or some other peer to the US's tech sector) just continues developing them to achieve an economic advantage. All in addition to the obvious political implications of AI chatbots being controlled by them. The LLM genie is out of the bottle: an unfavorable court ruling in a single country isn't going to stuff it back in.
• throwaway4good 3y ago
  The lawsuit itself (which arstechnica links to): https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20... From page 30 and onwards has some fairly clear examples on how ChatGPT has an (internal) copy of copyrighted material which it will recite verbatim. Essentially if you copy a lot of copyrighted material into a blob and then apply some sort of destructive compression to it. How destructive would that compression have to be for the copyright no longer to hold? My guess it would have to be a lot. As I see it the closeness of OpenAI may be what saves it. OpenAI could filter and block copyrighted material from the LLM from leaving the web interface using some straight forward matching mechanism against the copyrighted part of the data set ChatGPT has been trained on. Whereas open source projects trained on the same data set would be left with the much harder task of removing the copyrighted material from the LLM itself.
  • jprete 3y ago
    The answer to the "closedness" is externally controlled audits.
  • vanchor3 3y ago
    > Essentially if you copy a lot of copyrighted material into a blob and then apply some sort of destructive compression to it. How destructive would that compression have to be for the copyright no longer to hold? My guess it would have to be a lot. I imagine the goal is closer to "enough that no one notices we stole it", either in a way that it's not easily discoverable or even when directly analyzed there's enough plausible deniability to scrape by.
  • Jackson__ 3y ago
    I wonder how they got these results, seeing as they are not showing any of the usual UI's (i.e. ChatGPT/Copilot). It makes it difficult for me to ascertain whether it is repeating from it's training data, or they committed the same mistake as the OP article of using Copilot, which ends up googling(binging?) the article first, before replying.
• onetokeoverthe 3y ago
  [dead]
• rimeice 3y ago
  This wave is growing. Just cannot see how the big LLM players are going to get round this without paying big licence fees to content creators. Feels a bit like the torrent to Spotify moment, but for _all_ content, not just music. How they will manage the licensing model is beyond me, it’s going to be very easy for someone to sue these companies, but very difficult for the companies to calculate, attribute value and payout individual creators that contributed a tiny fraction of the training data. Surely this will make it very difficult for them to keep a business model working to a level their VC backers need to warrant even a fraction of their valuations.
• visarga 3y ago
  Wondering who tf reads old NYT articles? News become old really fast. chatGPT is months or years behind.
• fsckboy 3y ago
  in my head I like to think of web crawler search engines/search engine databases and LLMs as being somewhat similar. Search engines are ok if they just provide snippets with citations (urls), and they would be unacceptable if they provided large block quotes that removed the need to go to the original source to read the original expression of more complex ideas. A web-crawled LLM that lived within the same constraints would be a search engine under another name, with a slightly different presentation style. If it starts spitting out entire articles without citation, that's not acceptable.
  • aurareturn 3y ago
    I think it's different. LLMs can solve problems. Part of that problem-solving ability comes from training completely unrelated content such as NYT articles. GPT4 doesn't have to spit out NYT articles verbatim to have benefited from NYT articles. It uses NYT articles for every query.
    • fsckboy 3y ago
      Let's say I'm an academic; if my research, note-taking, and paper writing skills lead to fair-use, cited quotations where applicable, general knowledge not identified, and the creative aspects and unique conclusions creating the intriguing part of my work, that's copacetic. If I spit out (from memory, mind you) verbatim quotes and light rewordings of NY Times articles, that's not; "I don't remember where I got that material" doesn't cut it. My reading the NY Times every day for years because I judge it to be more literate and accurate than other sources, undoubtedly it has informed my thinking and style, but I don't need to acknowledge that. If I use ChatGPT as a research tool, as long as it lives within the same parameters that I have to live within, I don't see a problem with its education/learning. I understand that the NYTimes would like a slice of anything that comes out of the GPT but I'm talking about what seems reasonable. People who share their copyrighted material do not own all of the thinking that comes out of it; they own that expression of it, that is all. Will AI destroy the economics of "writing" the way the web has killed newspapers? perhaps, perhaps we'll all benefit from and need a new model, but killing the new to keep the old on life support is not the way.
• rich_sasha 3y ago
  If you forget about the LLM aspect, and simply build a product out of (legally) scraped NYT articles, is that fair use? Let's say I host these, offer some indexing on it, and rewrite articles. Something like, summarise all articles on US-UK relationships over past 5 years. I charge money for it, and all I pay NYT is a monthly subscription fee. To keep things simple, let's say I never regurgitate chunks of verbatim NYT articles, maybe quite short snippets. Is that fair use? IANAL, but doesn't sound like it. Typically I can't take a personal "tier" of a product and charge 3rd parties for derivatives of it. Say like VS Code. A sibling comment mentions search engines. I think there's a big difference. A search engine doesn't replace the source, not at all. Rather it points me at it, and offers me the opportunity to pay for the article. Whereas either this or an LLM uses NYT content as an alternative to actually paying for an NYT subscription. But then what do I know...
  • logicchains 3y ago
    > Something like, summarise all articles on US-UK relationships over past 5 years. I charge money for it, and all I pay NYT is a monthly subscription fee. >Is that fair use? IANAL, but doesn't sound like it. If you pay someone to do the summarisation for you, then you publish the content and charge a fee for it, you're the one liable, not the person you paid to summarise it for you. Similarly if you ask GPT to do it for you, then publish it, you're liable for what you publish; GPT is just a summarisation tool.
    • rich_sasha 3y ago
      That's not the example. Here I proactively scrape NYT, summarise articles for a fee and sell that as a service. It's not people coming to me with some articles to summarise, and maybe then publishing it online. At some level it becomes a subversion of NYTs fees. First, say I subscribe and simply host the articles verbatim, for a fee. Clearly, that's not right. Suppose I change some spelling or word order, or use a synonym or two. That's still not ok. And if I substantially paraphrase the articles? I guess this is the relevant case. This is kind of what LLMs do. And also feels like not fair use.
      • 3y ago
• logicchains 3y ago
  NYT's perspective is going to look so stupid in future when we put LLMs into mechanical bodies with the ability to interact with the physical world, and to learn/update their weights live. It would make it completely illegal for such a robot to read/watch/listen to any copyrighted material; no watching TV, no reading library books, no browsing the internet, because in doing so it could memorise some copyrighted content.
  • ramraj07 3y ago
    Will it? If the LLM in the body is allowed to read nytimes on a tablet I'm sure they wouldn't care.
    • logicchains 3y ago
      >If the LLM in the body is allowed to read nytimes on a tablet I'm sure they wouldn't care. Why should the law treat a LLM in a body reading NYT on a tablet differently than a LLM browsing the content from a website online and reading that?
  • type_Ben_struct 3y ago
    I disagree. The verbatim part is the problem. You’re drawing a comparison to how humans operate except we’re not allowed to operate like that. While harder to do as a human, if memorised a copyrighted book and then did a live reading on TV, or produced replicas from memory and sold them (the most comparable example), I’d be sued. Humans produce derivative work all the time, and it’s fine for LLM’s to do that, but you can’t do it verbatim.
    • logicchains 3y ago
      >or produced replicas from memory and sold them (the most comparable example), I’d be sued. This is not the most comparable example, because it's not what ChatGPT is doing. The most comparable example is if you were hired as a contractor and the employer asked you to write verbatim some copyright content you'd memorised. If the employer then published it, they'd be the one liable, not you. >Humans produce derivative work all the time, and it’s fine for LLM’s to do that, but you can’t do it verbatim. Nobody's suggesting preventing humans from consuming any copyrighted content just because in future they might recite some of it verbatim, but that's what NYT want for LLMs.
• jrockway 3y ago
  I read about this in the Times today (and am surprised that it wasn't on HN already). My guess is that the court will likely find in the Times favor, because the legal system won't be able to understand how training works and because people are "scared" of AI. To me, reading a book, putting it in some storage system, and then recalling it to form future thoughts is fair use. It's what we all do all the time, and I think that's exactly what training is. I might say something like "I, for one, welcome our new LLM overlords". Am I infringing the copyright of The Simpsons? No. I am guessing some technicality like a terms-of-use violation of the website (avoidable if you go to the library and type in back issues of the Times), or storing the text between training sessions is what will do OpenAI in here. The legal system has never been particularly comfortable with how computers work; for example, the only reason EULAs work is because you "copy" software when your OS reads the program off of disk into memory (and from memory into cache, and from cache into registers). That would be copyright infringement according to courts, so you have to agree to a license to get that permission. I think the precedent on copyright law is way off base, granting too much power to authors and too little to user. But because it's so favorable towards "rightsholders", I expect the Times to prevail here.
  • hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
    My hard drive can - bit for bit - recall video files. If I serve them to other people on the internet without permission of the copyright holder, that’s called piracy.
    • ninjinxo 3y ago
      But is it still piracy if you compress them and serve only a likeness of the original?
      • hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
        If 20% of a NYT article is recalled correctly, does that mean I can publish 20% of a movie if surrounded by junk? What if I do that 5 times over?
      • 3y ago
• wseqyrku 3y ago
  Sounds like 2024 is gonna be the year of lawsuits like this.
• chmod600 3y ago
  Isn't copyright tethered somehow to a notion of "expression"? That is, the same ideas and facts expressed differently are a different work? Sure, when something is clearly derived, or just expressed in a new medium, then I'm sure it's still covered. But if it goes through an LLM and the result bears little resemblance, how can that still fall under copyright?
  • visarga 3y ago
    As you said AI can rewrite articles, obtaining a clean cut separation between ideas and expression. Keep the ideas, write a new text. And if you got multiple sources, the more sources you use the better, it would make the output be even more different. This approach could also check consistency and bias between sources.
• cynicalsecurity 3y ago
  Nothing will come out of it. NY times will lose.
• globular-toast 3y ago
  > To me, reading a book, putting it in some storage system, and then recalling it to form future thoughts is fair use. It's what we all do all the time, and I think that's exactly what training is. If the AI can recall the text verbatim then it's not at all the same. When we read we are not able to reproduce the book from our memory. Even if a human could memorise an entire book it's not at all practical to reproduce the book from that. The current AIs are not learning "ideas", they are learning orders of words.
  • contravariant 3y ago
    Yeah the comparison to humans is silly anthropomorphising at this point. However I am inclined to agree with them for the simple fact that putting a file into a device and letting that device reproduce parts of the file should be allowed. I mean we're already at the point where this simple right is under pressure from DRM, but people should be allowed to do whatever they want with the files they own. Whether you can publish this output and share it with the world is a whole different issue.
• andrewstuart 3y ago
  Means nothing. An ambit claim that Rupert is throwing out there to see what he can get.
• munchinator 3y ago
  Why hasn't the Times also sued the Internet Archive? They've tried to block both the Internet Archive [1] and Open AI [2] from archiving their site, but why have they only sued OAI and not IA? The fact that they haven't sued IA which has comparatively little money would seem to indicate that this is not about fair use per se, but simply about profit-seeking and the NYT is selecting targets with deep pockets like OAI/MS. [1] https://theintercept.com/2023/09/17/new-york-times-website-internet-archive/ https://theintercept.com/2023/09/17/new-york-times-website-i... [2] https://fortune.com/2023/08/25/major-media-organizations-are-blocking-openai-bot-from-scraping-content/ https://fortune.com/2023/08/25/major-media-organizations-are...
  • killingtime74 3y ago
    What's wrong with that? If I was the NY Time's lawyers that what I would advise. What would it serve to bankrupt the IA, they can't pay anyway? These are corporations enforcing their rights against one another. There is nothing wrong with profit seeking from your copyright. That's literally their entire business model...they publish copyrighted content which they sell for a subscription. OpenAI and others could easily have negotiated a licence instead of just using the data. They bet that it would be cheaper to be sued, lets find out if they bet correctly. Tangentially that's what Apple did with the sensor in their watch, it doesn't always pay off.
    • munchinator 3y ago
      > What would it serve to bankrupt the IA, they can't pay anyway? It would serve the termination of the infringement. My point is that the Times doesn't particular seem to care about infringement per se, they care about getting their slice of the cut from that infringement. It's like if a video game company or a movie company only attempted to sue illegal downloaders who had a certain net worth.
      • sensanaty 3y ago
        > It's like if a video game company or a movie company only attempted to sue illegal downloaders who had a certain net worth. I mean yeah, no one's gonna bother trying to squeeze money out of Joe Schmoe with 10 bucks in his bank account over some pirated movies. If a company with billions and billions of dollars like Netflix started pushing out pirated movies instead, then obviously they'd be sued into oblivion, as they should be.
• shp0ngle 3y ago
  Microsoft is one of the companies that love to use copyright to get their way, BSA is known software mafia, so I'm not at all sympathetic to them.
• bdd8f1df777b 3y ago
  I see few people here bring this up, so let me: The US constitution says, The Congress shall have Power > 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; So the Congress's power to make copyright and patent laws is predicated on promotion of science and useful arts (I believe this actually means technology). In a sense, the OpenAI being the forefront of our AI technology advancement is crucial to the equation. To hinder the progress by copyright is, in my mind, unconstitutional.
  • globular-toast 3y ago
    Current AI is useless without people writing the articles in the first place.
  • madeofpalk 3y ago
    Wishful thinking. Just as equally, NYT’s right to copyright over its material, in order to have a functional press, is enshrined the constitution. Anyone threatening that copyright could be unconstitutional. I think we all agree that no one is entitled to “progress of science” at any cost - as a straw man, killing hundreds of newborn babies for scientific research is not great - so we use ethics and the legal system to find the line of what’s acceptable. I don’t know exactly what NYT is asking for here, but the two options aren’t unconsented training vs nothing at all. NYT could license, for a fee, its content to OpenAI. It’s pretty common for scientists to have to pay for materials!
• skc 3y ago
  Kind of ironic that the NYT will still have to host articles extolling the virtues of OpenAI as it continues to expand and upend industries
• joshxyz 3y ago
  only winner here is the lawyers of both parties laughing their way to the bank. god i love this era, so much grey area in these edge technologies.
• munchinator 3y ago
  It's interesting to me the ambiguous attitude people have to reproducing news content. Whenever there is a story from NYT on HN (or any other large media outlet), the top comment is almost always a link to an archived version which reproduces the text verbatim. And this seems to be tolerated as the norm. And yet, whenever there is a submission about a book, a TV show, a movie, a video game, an album, a comic book, or any other form of IP, it is in fact very much _not_ the norm for the top-rated comment to be a Pirate Bay link. I think that's something worth reflecting on, about why we feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other IP. And the reason I bring this up, is that it seems like Open AI has the same attitude: scraping news articles is OK, or at worst a gray area, but what if they were also scraping, for example, Netflix content to use as part of their training set?
  • Erratic6576 3y ago
    I find “4nn4’$ 4rch1v3 dot ORG” actually way better than pirate bay for pirating knowledge. It’s amazing the amount of books that copyright laws prevent us from finding https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-m...
    • munchinator 3y ago
      Sure. It's just curious to me that news article have a pirated knowledge link as the de facto top comment, but link submissions to, for example, books for sale on Amazon don't have a link to Anna's Archive or equivalent.
      • Txmm 3y ago
        I think the archive of an article is more preservation of history and maintaining records of events which often disappear if not archived. The number of threads referencing articles which are defunct is always increasing. A book or movie or original content on the other hand will continue to hold its own commercial value so reproducing it is more akin to an actual loss for the license holder. Definitely a grey area when that content is then used to train models though.
• frakrx 3y ago
  Under existing condition an AI news site seems like a good investment idea. Its AI could read all relevant news sources and retell them and republish them in its own articles. It could even have its own AI editors and contributors. Cannot see how human news companies could compete.
  • logicchains 3y ago
    >Cannot see how human news companies could compete. News ultimately comes from physical sources on the ground, which currently AI has no way of doing.
    • frakrx 3y ago
      I am sure it could easily rephrase the articles to tell them without quoting any real or verifiable sources. Many human news companies often do it too.
    • kjkjadksj 3y ago
      That style of journalism is nearly dead. True on the ground investigative journalism is hardly done today, most is just reporting existing public information releases. You don’t have to be at the presser when everything the police chief says will be put in an online transcript.
• wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  We developers like to pretend that LLM's are akin to humans and that they've been using things like NYTimes like humans as educational material. But they are not. It's much simpler, proprietary writing is now integrated into the source code of OpenAI, it would be as if I would copy parts of other propriety code and copy paste it into my own codebase. Claiming copy paste is a natural evolving process of millions of years of evolution. The fact that LLM's are so complicated and we don't know where it is, doesn't make it less so.
  • logicchains 3y ago
    > it would be as if I would copy parts of other propriety code and copy paste it into my own codebase. It's not copy-pasted; it's compressed in a lossy manner. Even GPT4 has nowhere near enough memory to store the entirety of its training data in a non-lossy compression format. Just likes how humans compress the information we read.
    • lacrimacida 3y ago
      >Just likes how humans compress the information we read. Humans don’t have the scale machines have and moreover humans aren’t sevices, that argument doesn’t fly. I really think NYTs data isn’t that important and nor crucial, LLMs could’ve just elided it. However, it’s more about training on copyrighted data in general which is kind of crucial for OpenAi, they trained their LLMs indiscriminately on copyrighted content without any plan to share any profits.
    • wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
      You're kind of proving my comment pretending they are akin to a human brain instead of an evolved form of statistics mixed with code, aka transformer model. Let alone that it's a centralised model that's being distributed for a fee.
    • wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
      So if compress nytimes articles into a vector database and query it is a vector then that's okay in line with your reasoning?
• sunpazed 3y ago
  > “The tragedy of the Luddites is not the fact that they failed to stop industrialization so much as the way in which they failed. Human rebellion proved inadequate against the pull of technological advancement.” https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/rethinking-the-luddites-in-the-age-of-ai https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/rethinking-the-l...
• dash2 3y ago
  There’s an awful lot of confident statements be made about the law here. I wonder if anyone who is actually a lawyer would like to chime in.
• unstatusthequo 3y ago
  I’d be happy if the NYT was deleted. I find it has very little use as a source of anything, much like most mainstream media.
• chris_wot 3y ago
  Fair use is something Wikipedians dance around a fair amount. It also meant I did a lot of reading about it. It’s a four part test. Let’s examine it thusly: 1. Transformative. Is it? It spits out informative text and opinion. The only “transformation” is that its generative text. IMO that’s a fail. 2. Nature of the work - it’s being used commercially. Given it’s being trained partially on editorial, that’s creative enough that I think any judge would find it problematic. Fail on this criteria. 3. Amount. It looks like they trained the model on all of the NYT articles. Oops, definite fail. 4. Effect on the market. Almost certainly negative for the NYT. IMO, OpenAI cannot successfully claim fair use.
  • EMIRELADERO 3y ago
    You're getting mixed up. When applying the four factors, you need to individually separate all the uses. So you would need to repeat the fair use test for every alleged type of infringement. This means that the scraping from the public internet to OpenAI's dataset storage cluster is one instance where the full analysis of the 4 must take place, then the training itself, so another full analysis, then the distribution of model outputs, another one, etc.
    • chris_wot 3y ago
      Why so? From the point of view of the company alleging damage the separation of processes is irrelevant. It all leads to massive copyright infringement. It is not the NYT making the claim of Fair Use, it is OpenAI.
      • EMIRELADERO 3y ago
        Because fair use is an affirmative defense to each claim, not to the general accusation. So if someone sues you for "copyright infringment", broadly speaking, but then you look at the actual document and it's 4 claims based on 4 sections of U.S.C Title 17, you can raise a fair use defense to two of them and a different one to the other two, or none at all for those last ones and simply settle them, while still defending the first two.
• 1f60c 3y ago
  I believe that ChatGPT is fair use, just on a much larger scale than we're used to.
• ssijak 3y ago
  If I create a news website where I write articles in the following way: - Read 20 different news websites and their story on the same event/topic - Wait an hour, grab a cup of coffee - Sit down to write my article, never from this point I open any of the 20 news websites, I write the story from my head - I don't consult any other source, just write from my memory, and my memory is, let's say, not the best one, so I will never write more than 10 words exactly as they appear on any of the 20 websites. - I will probably also write something that is not correct or add something new because, as I said, my memory is not the best. Is that fair use? Am I infringing on copyright?
  • gumballindie 3y ago
    If you are piece of software then yes.
    • schleck8 3y ago
      Yes to what?
      • gumballindie 3y ago
        A human could tell.
• ehwhwhwhahhwh 3y ago
  NYT could also fix the issue by deleting NYT itself. Could be a better result for humanity as well. Thanks.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• JackFr 3y ago
  I think LLMs may really change the IP landscape. Culturally we’re taught that there is a moral component to copyright and patent law - that stealing is stealing. But the idea that words or thoughts or images can be owned (and that the might if the state can be brought to bear to enforce it) would seem utterly ludicrous to someone from an earlier era. Copyright and patent laws exist for practical, pragmatic reasons - and seemingly they have served us well, but it’s not unreasonable to re-examine them from first principals.
  • narenkeshav 3y ago
    I remember a case where the court did not allow ID to patent "First person shooters" This rings similar.
  • flanked-evergl 3y ago
    > But the idea that words or thoughts or images can be owned (and that the might if the state can be brought to bear to enforce it) would seem utterly ludicrous to someone from an earlier era. Is there any research into how people from earlier eras thought about it? And should all laws that seemed ludicrous to someone from an earlier era be discarded? If not, how exactly do we determine the relevance of what someone from an earlier era would think about our laws?
• fbhabbed 3y ago
  This is getting a bit out of hand isn't it.
• nektro 3y ago
  oh how joyous that would be. I so hope they win
• ranting-moth 3y ago
  Let's try the "reverse the gender" card. Let's say OpenAI was trained on all the Windows source code (without approval from MS). GPT could pretty much replicate the windows code with even not that clever prompt by any user. "Write an OS CreateProcess function like Windows 10 source code would have." It would infuriate MS to put it mildly, enough to start a lawsuit. I know the license to the MS source code and NYT articles aren't the same.
• throwuwu 3y ago
  If they lose they should delete the NY Times
• 4death4 3y ago
  I think there is a national security aspect to ML models trained on copyrighted data. Countries that allow it will gain a superior technological advantage and outcompete those who disallow training on copyrighted material. I personally believe training LLMs on copyrighted data is copyright infringement if the models are deployed in a way that competes with the copyright holder. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s something we should disallow.
  • kjkjadksj 3y ago
    You can say the same for any legal enforcement like respecting patent or copyright law or making Champagne outside France. Yet the sky isn’t falling given this reality with so many legally protected industries. Maybe these markets where such an industry might offshore to are too small and insular to be very significant, and are probably language bound to make english models less relevant compared to native language models.
    • 4death4 3y ago
      Champagne isn’t a transformative technology, and least not anymore.
• a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  The NYT is preparing for a tsunami by building a sandcastle. Big picture, this suit won’t matter, for so many reasons. To enumerate a few: 1. Next gen LLMs will be trained exclusively on “synthetic”/public data. GPT-4V can easily whitewash its entire copyrighted training corpus to be unrecognizably distinct (say reworded by 40%, authors/sources stripped, etc). Ergo there will be no copyright material for GPT-5 to regurgitate. 2. Research/hosting/progress will proceed. The US cannot stop this, only choose to be left behind. The world will move on, with China gleefully watching as their biggest rival commits intellectual suicide all to appease rent seeking media companies. 3. Models can share weights, merge together, cooperate, ablate, evolve over many generations (releases), etc. Copyright law is woefully ill equipped to handle chasing down violators in this AI lineage soup, annealed with data of dubious/unknown provenance. I could go on, but the point is that, for better or worse, we live in a new intellectual era. The NYT et al are coming along for the ride, whether they like it or not.
  • mat0 3y ago
    I'm sorry but this is such a bad take. Nice appeal to consequences. In my view, the New York Times is entirely justified in pursuing legal action. They invested time and effort in creating content, only to have it used without permission for monetary gain. A clear violation. Analyzing the factors involved for a "fair use" consideration: Purpose and Character of the Use: While the argument for transformation might hold in the future as you point out, the current dispute revolves around verbatim use. So clearly not transformative. Also commercial use is more difficult to be ruled fair use. Nature of the Copyrighted Work: Using works that are more factual may be more likely to be considered fair use, but I would argue that NYT articles are as creative as factual. Amount and Substantiality of the Portion Used: In this case, the entirety of the articles was used, leaving no room for a claim of using an insignificant portion. Effect on the Market Value: NYT isn't getting any money from this, and it's clearly not helping their market value if people are checking on ChatGPT instead of reading a NYT article. IANAL, but in my opinion NYT is well within its rights to pursue legal action. Progress is inevitable, but as humans, we must actively shape and guide it. Otherwise it cannot be called progress. In this context, legal action serves as a necessary means for individuals and organizations to assert their rights and influence its course.
• kolinko 3y ago
  Worth noting, that - at least the screenshot - shows an example of browsing functionality used to go around paywalls, not that the model itself is trained, or can reproduce the articles really. IIRC this was the reason why the browsing plugin was disabled for some time after its introduction - they were patching up this hole.
• sensanaty 3y ago
  I love seeing all the AI sycophants squirm at this news. Here's to hoping NYT wins this one and gets everything they ask for, and more!
  • ugjka 3y ago
    I don't know if winning this will improve their business model I don't use chat gpt to get the news but also i don't buy paywalls
• habosa 3y ago
  People who think the examples the lawsuit are “fair use” need to consider what that would mean. We’re basically going to let a few companies consolidate all the value on the Internet into their black boxes with basically no rules … that seems very dangerous to me. I hope a court establishes some rules of engagement here, even if it’s not this case.
  • w4ffl35 3y ago
    Scraping is legal, and this seems like a transformative work to me.
    • aqme28 3y ago
      Returning the full text of an article verbatim seems to me like the opposite of "transformative."
      • Symmetry 3y ago
        In the screenshot for the article you can see that the LLM says it is "Searching for: carl zimmer article on the oldest DNA". That, and what I know about how LLMs work, suggest to me that rather than the article being stored inside the trained LLM it was instead downloaded in response to the question. So the fact that the system is providing the full text of the article doesn't really go to whether training the LLM is a transformative use or not.
        • bonzini 3y ago
          Yes, the screenshot in the article is clearly doing an Internet search. The exhibit in the lawsuit shows that you can complete an article by using GPT on the first sentence of the prompt, with low temperature to aid reproducibility, and obtaining the original except for a single word. That is another thing, and it shows that the LLM has basically recorded the original text into its weights in compressed form: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GCY4WC6XYAAq-JS?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GCY4WC6XYAAq-JS?format=jpg&name=...
• elif 3y ago
  At some point the burden of carrying 100 year old copywriter/patent law will become so onerous a burden on the pace of progress that its enforcement will be antihuman.
  • ryukoposting 3y ago
    It already is, but I don't think this is a good example. NYT has a legitimate case here. They own the material they publish, and GPT-4 is shown to be able to recall entire articles verbatim. That's a violation, clear as day. The thing about lawsuits is that you make dozens of claims, and the court can rule in favor of some of them, and against others. The question of "is LLM training fair use?" hasn't made it to a high court yet. The court could very easily rule against everything else in the suit.
    • elif 3y ago
      A photocopier can reproduce entire articles verbatim, yet no one calls for the destruction of all photocopiers. In fact, many legitimate legal uses of photocopiers to reproduce whole newspaper articles take place commonly by archivists, journalists, students, etc. It is the specific use of article photocopies to circumvent the normal sale of newspapers that becomes illegal.. and even that is questionable. If I read the newspaper left out in a waiting room and it keeps me from buying that days paper, this is not a criminal act.
• ryukoposting 3y ago
  > All of that costs money, and The Times earns that by limiting access to its reporting through a robust paywall. Not to be pedantic, but NYT has the least robust paywall I've ever seen. Just turn on reader mode in your browser. Simple. I get that it's still tresspassing if I walk into an unlocked house, but NYT could try installing a lock that isn't made of confetti and uncooked pasta.
• kweingar 3y ago
  The thing that bothers me about the whole situation is that OpenAI prohibits using its model output as training data for your own models. It seems more than a bit hypocritical, no? When it comes to their own training data, they claim to have the right to use any/all of humanity’s intellectual output. But for your own training data, you can use everything except for their product, conveniently for them.
• cpt100 3y ago
  Given that Harvard President plagiarized her way into becoming a President, how can we be sure that NYT doesn't plagiarize and take content from X and other places to quickly chrun out daily news?
• orenlindsey 3y ago
  [flagged]
• andy99 3y ago
  This, or a lawsuit like it is going to be the SCO vs IBM of the 2020's, to wit: a copyright troll trying to extract rent, with various special interests cheering it on to try and promote their own agenda (ironically it was Microsoft that played that role with SCO). It's funny how times have changed and at least now a louder group seem to be on the troll's side. I hope to see some better analysis on the frivolity of this come out. There may be some commercial subtlety in specific cases that doesn't depend on scraping and training, but fundamentally using public internet data for training is not copying, is fair use, and is better for society as a whole than whatever ridiculous alternative might be proposed. edit: I'm speaking about training broadly capable foundation models like GPTn. It would of course be possible to build a model that only parrots copyrighted content and it would be hard to argue that is fair use.
  • dannyr 3y ago
    NYTimes has a paywall. Is that public internet and therefore fair use?
    • yreg 3y ago
      They don't have the paywall up if you identify as a search engine scraper, so it is kinda public internet. (I'm not claiming it's fair use.)
  • jamiek88 3y ago
    Using the words troll and frivolous undermines your otherwise decent point and in fact goes against your point. The law isn’t settled, it’s a genuine legal question mark. It ain’t frivolous or trolling or ridiculous.
  • logicchains 3y ago
    >It's funny how times have changed and at least now a louder group seem to be on the troll's side Because for many people, their views on current events are whatever the "thought leaders" working for the NYT and similar publications tell them to think.
  • phkahler 3y ago
• Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Looks like this is a case of Media vs Tech which might be solved by the courts using past paradigms but should really be addresses by legislation specific to this situation. The difficulty for the media companies, at least in the US, is that both major political parties see the media as the enemy. The left might be a bit more positive about the media but overall, they still see the media as something owned by wealthy elites suppressing knowledge of the harm the powerful inflict on the weak and powerless. Over on the Tech side of things, one party sees Tech as wholly owned by other side of the political divide. Over on that side, things are relatively (but not completely) friendly, so my guess is Tech will end up winning simply because it has more friends in the political realm than the Media does.
• djhope99 3y ago
  This argument that the LLM is learning seems slightly flawed when you consider that other experts in the field consider it more like lossy compression. If it’s lossy compression that’s really happening here then you can understand the copyright argument. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, lots of new ground breaking.
• exabrial 3y ago
  I'm actually fine with this. Copyright holders never consented to having their work used in this manner.
• lwhi 3y ago
  Surely there's no chance OpenAI would agree to this? Isn't it more likely that the company buys the NYT?
• hazmazlaz 3y ago
  I'd rather have GPT than the NY Times, if I had to choose between one or the other.
• mark_l_watson 3y ago
  I think Apple has really got ahead of this game: early deals to pay for AI training data/content. I need to do some research but I think Anthropic also does this. After a year of largely using OpenAI APIs, I am now much more into smaller “open” models for I hope the major contributors like Meta/Facebook are following Apple’s lead. Off topic, but: even finding the smaller “open” models much less capable, they capture my imagination and my personal research time.
  • efields 3y ago
    Not sure if they’re ahead but I think it was smart to not ship anything LLMlike until the regulations get made first movers test the waters. Casey Newton has been saying all year that these things will be awesome once we can unleash them on our own corpus of data safely. “Siri” already does a great job digging through my photos and picking the good memories. I can let my camera roll become a visual junk drawer now. Do the same for my email. Make “Find” the tool we always wanted to be. I don’t care if I’m conflating LLMs/AI with other smart tech.
• dewbrite 3y ago
  Summarizing the article: The most damning thing here is the "ChatGPT as a search engine" feature, which appears to run an agent which performs a search, visits pages, and returns the best results. In doing this, it is bypassing the NY Times paywall, and you can read full articles from today by repeatedly asking for the next paragraph.
• bigmattystyles 3y ago
  Not that it would solve this, but how hard would it be for ChatGpt or other problems to cite the sources used in a response. Is that difficult to capture and tag to 'knowledge' within a LLM? It could be a best of both worlds type situation if LLMs cited sources and linked to the source itself. Isn't that what happened with Google News's home page? I seem to recall that when Google took it away in some markets, at the behest of the news orgs, they quickly reversed course as their traffic plummeted.
  • jejeyyy77 3y ago
    not likely with the way these models have been trained - its basically broken down into sub-words that are all mashed together into probabilities.
  • qznc 3y ago
    This is not possible. There is no database of sources inside an LLM. Just like the knowledge in your brain does not have sources attached. For an example, you referenced "what happened with Google News's home page". Could you give me your source? You could probably search for some suitable article for a reference, but you don't know a source from your memory.
• ctoth 3y ago
  Isn't the fundamental issue here that the NYT was available in Common Crawl? If they didn't want to share their content, why did they allow it to be scraped? If they did want to share their content, why do they care (hint: $88 billion)? Or is it that they wanted to share their content with Google and other search engines in order to bring in readers but now that an AI was trained on it they are angry? What wrong thing did OpenAI do specific to using Common Crawl? Didn't most companies use Common Crawl? Excepting Google, who had already scraped the whole damn Internet anyway and just used their search index? Is it legal or not to scrape the web? If I scrape the web, is it legal to train a transformer on it? Why or why not? To me, this is an incredibly open-and-shut case. You put something on the web, people will read that something. If that is illegal, Google is illegal. Oh, and do you see the part in the article where they are butthurt that it can reproduce the NYT style? > "Defendants’ GenAI tools can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style, as demonstrated by scores of examples," the suit alleges. Mimics its expressive style. Oh golly the robots can write like they're smug NYT reporters now--better sue! It appears that the NYT changed their terms of service in August to disallow their content in Common Crawl[0]. Wasn't GPT-4 trained far before August? 0]: https://www.adweek.com/media/the-new-york-times-updates-terms-of-service-to-prevent-ai-scraping-its-content/ https://www.adweek.com/media/the-new-york-times-updates-term...
  • rfw300 3y ago
    If you read the complaint, it explains this pretty well. The use of copyrighted content by search engines is fundamentally different from the way LLMs use that same content. The former directs traffic (and therefore $$) to the publisher, the latter keeps the traffic for itself. The legal misconception I want to flag in your logic is the notion that all uses of the Common Crawl are equally infringing/non-infringing. If you use the Common Crawl to create a list of how often every word in English appears on the internet, that’s unquestionably transformative use. But if you use it to host a mirror of the NYT website with free articles, that’s definitely infringement. The legality of scraping is one matter, and the legality of what you do with the scraped content is quite another.
    • 3y ago
• j0hnyl 3y ago
  I hope the world can rally and move past these anachronistic ideas of intellectual property.
• sylware 3y ago
  If they don't let AIs to be trained on a maximum of data as possible, those AIs will be less "good" than the ones trained without constraints like you will have in China or elsewhere, and people will mechanically start using the later. Unless they engage in massive IP and DNS banning, geolocation based, that forced upon all internet users and "external" users.
• poorman 3y ago
  Sad to say but I would believe a hallucination from OpenAI before I would believe anything that comes out of the NY Times. I mean the confidence interval for the NY Times is what again?
• andy99 3y ago
  I don't think the lawsuit has any merit, but I'd still like to encourage Sam Altman et al, if they really care about the greater good, to go Keyser Söze and immediately release torrents of the weights and source code for GPT-4 under GPL.
  • forrestthewoods 3y ago
    > I don't think the lawsuit has any merit The lawsuit fundamentally has merit. It asks a huge open question that no one knows the answer to. The outcome will be extraordinarily impactful. The question must be answered at some point. The case has merit even if NYT loses across the board.
    • kasey_junk 3y ago
      I can see how someone can disagree with the NYT position but the idea that it lacks merit is wild! AI might be the defining issue of copyright law for decades. There are so many open questions, and this seems like just the start.
    • ls612 3y ago
      How is the question being asked different from the Google Books case?
      • smitty1110 3y ago
        You’re not just display the contents of copyrighted works publicly, they’re selling access. This flips the script for the 1st factor of the Fair Use test. Additionally, by selling it to people who use it to get news summaries, you can argue you damage the market for a NY Times subscription, which triggers the 4th factor.
      • lesuorac 3y ago
        I don't think anybody has claimed that OpenAI is causing NYT subscriptions to go up. NYT has even expressly made the claim they're losing potential revenue. > [1] On the most important factor, possible economic damage to the copyright owner, [Judge] Chin wrote that "Google Books enhances the sales of books to the benefit of copyright holders." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
• amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Two not-so subtle paragraphs about the "partnership" between Microsoft and OpenAI: > 15. Microsoft Corporation is a Washington corporation with a principal place of business and headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft has invested at least $13 billion in OpenAI Global LLC in exchange for which Microsoft will receive 75% of that company’s profits until its investment is repaid, after which Microsoft will own a 49% stake in that company. > 16. Microsoft has described its relationship with the OpenAI Defendants as a “partnership.” This partnership has included contributing and operating the cloud computing services used to copy Times Works and train the OpenAI Defendants’ GenAI models. It has also included, upon information and belief, substantial technical collaboration on the creation of those models. Microsoft possesses copies of, or obtains preferential access to, the OpenAI Defendants’ latest GenAI models that have been trained on and embody unauthorized copies of the Times Works. Microsoft uses these models to provide infringing content and, at times, misinformation to users of its products and online services. During a quarterly earnings call in October 2023, Microsoft noted that “more than 18,000 organizations now use Azure OpenAI Service, including new-to-Azure customers.”
• Kon-Peki 3y ago
  > Because the outputs of Defendants’ GenAI models compete with and closely mimic the inputs used to train them, copying Times works for that purpose is not fair use. This is interesting. The NYT is specifically saying that the way you use an LLM impacts what you can legally use for training the LLM. They're firing shots at the big guys trying to sell access to an LLM, but not at the little guy self-hosting for fun or academics doing research.
  • lesuorac 3y ago
    They're probably saying that because its what the supreme court said except about a human copying a work created by another human. https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176881182/supreme-court-sides-against-andy-warhol-foundation-in-copyright-infringement-cas https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176881182/supreme-court-side...
    • Kon-Peki 3y ago
      That's a good bet. Down at the bottom of the linked PDF are some more interesting allegations: Count 5 - MS/OpenAI removed NYT copyright notices in violation of the DMCA. Count 7 - By attributing hallucinated garbage to NYT, MS/OpenAI is diluting NYT trademarks in violation of US Trademark law. I admit: I laughed. This will be an entertaining lawsuit to follow.
      • bugglebeetle 3y ago
        What will ultimately happen is that OpenAI and all big tech with have to pay out some sizable sum to large copyright holders, and in exchange be granted a de facto exclusive right to develop these technologies further because they’re the only ones who can do so “responsibly” with respect to copyright. It will take a long time to wind its way through the courts, but this could be the death knell for open source LLMs in the US.
        • danielbln 3y ago
          Meanwhile, open source LLMs are excluded from stringendo regulation in the US, abd with Mistral there is some knowhow that isn't in SV, which is also jicem
• starchild3001 3y ago
  I asked an LLM to summarize the 69 page lawsuit. It does a decent job. Didn't infringe on any copyrights in the process :) Here is a summary of the key points from the legal complaint filed by The New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI: The New York Times filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI alleging that their generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Bing Chat infringe on The Times's intellectual property rights by copying and reproducing Times content without permission to train their AI models. The Times invests enormous resources into producing high-quality, original journalism and has over 3 million registered copyrighted works. Its business models rely on subscriptions, advertising, licensing fees, and affiliate referrals, all of which require direct traffic to NYTimes.com. The complaint alleges Microsoft and OpenAI copied millions of Times articles, investigations, reviews, and other content on a massive scale without permission to train their AI models. The models encode and "memorize" copies of Times works which can be retrieved verbatim. Defendants' tools like ChatGPT and Bing then display this protected content publicly. OpenAI promised to freely share its AI research when founded in 2015 but pivoted to a for-profit model in 2019. Microsoft invested billions into OpenAI and provides all its cloud computing. Their partnership built special systems to scrape and store training data sets with Times content emphasized. The complaint includes many examples of the AI models reciting verbatim excerpts of Times articles, showing they were trained on this data. It also shows the models fabricating quotes and attributing them to the Times. Microsoft's integration of the OpenAI models into Bing Chat and other products boosted its revenues and market value tremendously. OpenAI's release of ChatGPT also made it hugely valuable. But their commercial success relies significantly on unlicensed use of Times works. The Times attempted to negotiate a deal with Microsoft and OpenAI but failed, hence this lawsuit. Generating substitute products that compete with inputs used to train models does not qualify as "fair use" exemptions to copyright. The Times seeks damages and injunctive relief. In summary, The New York Times alleges Microsoft and OpenAI's AI products infringe Times copyrights on a massive scale to unfairly benefit at The Times's expense. The Times invested heavily in content creation and controls how its work is used commercially. Using Times content without payment or permission to build competitive tools violates its rights under copyright law.
  • starchild3001 3y ago
    A Second LLM's take on this lawsuit can be found below. I'd love to see OpenAI address these complaints publicly and without incurring any additional damages to NYT. The document is a legal complaint filed by The New York Times Company against Microsoft Corporation and various OpenAI entities, alleging copyright infringement and other related claims. The New York Times Company (The Times) accuses the defendants of unlawfully using its copyrighted works to create artificial intelligence (AI) products that compete with The Times, particularly generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools and large language models (LLMs). These tools, such as Microsoft's Bing Chat and OpenAI's ChatGPT, allegedly copy, use, and rely heavily on The Times’s content without permission or compensation. Nature of the Action: The Times emphasizes the importance of independent journalism to democracy and claims its ability to continue providing this service is threatened by the defendants' actions. The complaint argues that the GenAI tools are built upon unlawfully copied New York Times content, which undermines The Times's investments in journalism. Defendants: The defendants include Microsoft Corporation and various OpenAI entities, such as OpenAI Inc., OpenAI LP, and several other related companies. The Times alleges these entities have worked together to create and profit from the GenAI tools in question. Allegations: 1. Copyright Infringement: The Times claims the defendants copied millions of its copyrighted articles and other content to train their GenAI models. This training allegedly involves large-scale copying and use of The Times’s content, emphasizing its quality and value in building effective AI models. 2. Unlawful Competition: The Times argues that the defendants' GenAI tools compete with it by providing access to its content for free, which could potentially divert readers and revenue away from The Times. 3. Misattribution and Hallucinations: The Times asserts that the defendants' tools not only unlawfully distribute its content but also generate and attribute false information to The Times, damaging its credibility and trust with readers. 4. Trademark Dilution: The complaint includes claims that the defendants' use of The Times’s trademarks in connection with lower-quality or inaccurate AI-generated content dilutes and tarnishes its brand. 5. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Violations: The Times alleges that the defendants removed or altered copyright management information from its works, which is prohibited under the law. Harm to The Times: The Times claims it has suffered significant harm from these actions, including loss of control over its content, damage to its reputation for accuracy and quality, and financial losses due to diminished traffic and revenue. Demands: The Times seeks various forms of relief, including statutory damages, injunctive relief to prevent further infringement, destruction of the infringing AI models, and compensation for losses and legal fees. Overall Summary: This legal complaint represents a significant clash between traditional media and emerging AI technology companies. It underscores the complex legal, ethical, and economic issues arising from the use of copyrighted content to train AI systems. The outcome of this case could have far-reaching implications for the AI industry, content creators, and the broader digital ecosystem.
• fuzzfactor 3y ago
  What if you were one of the people who read the Times from cover-to-cover every day and seriously tries to remember as much as possible because you consider it a trustworthy reference source? And if you were called upon to solve a problem based on knowledge you consider trustworthy, what would you come up with? What if you were even specifically directed to utilize only findings gleaned from the Times exclusively? And what if that was your only lifetime source of information whatsoever for some reason?
  • jjeaff 3y ago
    That would of course be fine. But then imagine that because human memory is not able to keep all that information straight, you made copies of all those newspapers. And then you started charging people for your knowledge. And then imagine that as part of your knowledge service, you would copy snippets from the times word for word and give that to your clients without citation and pass it off as your own.
    • fuzzfactor 3y ago
      Yup, that's the other side of the dodecahedron. As I understand it, it's the copying that can lead to infringement. Then again if you have acquired a legitimate copy, you should certainly be able to retain it and use it for reference. But for training a model on someone else's data I wouldn't even want a copy. Just skim the data and retain my own thoughts.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• test6554 3y ago
  How do I put this... Whether NYT is right or wrong, their case should be dismissed.
• Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  Huh, is this a big misunderstanding? The copilot screenshot they gave in the ars-technica article as well as many of the screenshots in the NYT article seems like it's actually displaying correct behavior for browsing the web. In these cases the system is more or less acting as a user agent (browser). AFAICT the NYT server actually gave that data to the user agent when it asked politely (200 OK, presumably). The user agent then displayed it to the user, which the user agent may do in any way it deems fit or appropriate. There's only one or two cases where this has gone against the user or user agent, in very specific circumstances. The server can eg say 403 Forbidden whenever it likes, so if it returns a 200 OK, what's a user agent to do other than believe it at its word? The only twist is that this user agent is now Imbued With AI (tm)(r)(c) . I don't think that really makes a difference here. If that's all this is, then it's more related to legal fights over certain ad-blockers or readability, which have similar functionality. * https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20... , eg. page 45; I mean it says "Model: Web Browsing" at the top, and "Finished browsing" right on the page. That particular subsystem is now integrated, so the UI/UX is different now, but IIRC the link was in the pulldown?
  • Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    Hum, on page 33 of the same complaint they show that they can get GPT to quote parts of an article from memory. Giving people single paragraphs need not be not illegal per-se. Very specifically, if you ask it for more than a paragraph at a time: > ' I'm unable to display the entire text of "Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek" by John Branch, as it is a copyrighted work. However, you can easily access the full story online. It was published by The New York Times and is available on their website. The story is notable for its engaging multimedia format, including text, images, and interactive elements.' Specifically, they go out of their way to lead GPT on, asking for several paragraphs in a row. It's pretty clear that GPT is an avid reader of the NYT, so in that particular case we're going to have to see if OpenAI's fair use defense for training holds. (ps. in the current GPT-4, it's actually somewhat tricky to even get to the point above at all. They have probably been improving AI instructions)
• dang 3y ago
  Related. Others? NYT sues OpenAI, Microsoft over 'millions of articles' used to train ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38784194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38784194 - Dec 2023 (80 comments) The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941 - Dec 2023 (837 comments) The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I.’s Use of Copyrighted Work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781863 - Dec 2023 (11 comments)
  • paulddraper 3y ago
    New York Times Sues Microsoft and OpenAI for 'Billions' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791368 - Dec 2023 (1 comment) New York Times Sues Microsoft and OpenAI, Alleging Copyright Infringement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781718 - Dec 2023 (1 comment) New York Times sues Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781908 - Dec 2023 (2 comments) New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for using articles to train AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782510 - Dec 2023 (1 comment) New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for allegedly infringing copyrighted work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783699 - Dec 2023 (1 comment) New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft over use of its stories to train chatbots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38784914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38784914 - Dec 2023 (1 comment) NY Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for infringing copyrighted works - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38786330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38786330 - Dec 2023 (1 comment) NYTimes sues OpenAI, Microsoft, for copyright infringement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38790845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38790845 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)
    • dang 3y ago
      I already went through those links and merged the comments into the above threads, so there's nothing in any of those (besides archive links to the articles).
• thunkshift1 3y ago
  I think this could be shakedown. They want money/licensing from openai the way apple was offering news companies recently. High probability this is settled out of court.
• labrador 3y ago
  NYT wants to outlaw a math game created by calculating the probablities of word groupings and words following each other in NYT times articles, along with a lot of of other writings NYT does not own. The players roll the dice, so to speak, by seeding an initial string of words and whoever comes up with the most interesting paragraph wins. This paragraph may or may not look like NYT times writings, which in the larger scheme the collected writings of humankind, isn't particularly unique. It doesn't even have to be true. Hallucinations are an expected outcome. If a NYT article says "Henry Kissenger was known to eat ice cream on a hot day" and our game outputs the same, it is purely by chance. It cannot be proven the output was copied verbatim from the NYT because the fragment "Henry Kissenger was known to" and "eat ice cream on a hot day" are not unique to the NYT or exclusive to it. Is the NYT claiming ownership of the weights in LLMs?
• ml-anon 3y ago
  ITT: the perfect storm of people who dont know how LLMs work, dont know how the brain works and dont know how the law works.
• thatgerhard 3y ago
  what a "surprisingly" short-signed approach by a obsolete media giant
• chucke1992 3y ago
  While copyright laws are ancient and outdated - and probably should be reformed or removed altogether - this lawsuit might be entertaining.