3 ms·
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
by 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.
- w4ffl35 3y agoImo gpt itself is the transformative work.
- tantalor 3y agoOk but it's not
- UrineSqueegee 3y agoDefinition of Transformative Use: The legal concept of transformative use involves significantly altering the original work to create new expressions, meanings, or messages. AI models like GPT don't merely reproduce text; they analyze, interpret, and recombine information to generate unique responses. This process can be argued as creating new meaning or purpose, different from the original works. In the case of the famous screenshot, the AI just relayed the information it found on the web, it's not included in its training data. So you're just wrong.
- tantalor 3y agoOnly humans can do those things, so the test fails for LLM
- bonzini 3y agoNope, it doesn't work that way. The fact that the LLM can regurgitate original articles doesn't remove the possibility that training can be considered transformative work, or more in general that using copyrighted material for training can be considered fair use. Rather, verbatim reproduction is the proof that copyrighted materials was used. Then the court has to evaluate whether it was fair use. Without verbatim reproduction, the court might just say that there is not enough proof that the Times's work was important for the training, and dismiss the lawsuit right away. Instead, the jury or court now will almost certainly have to evaluate OpenAI's operation against the four factors. In fact, I agree with the parent that ingesting text and creating a representation that can critique historical facts using material that came from the Times is transformative. An LLM is not just a set of compressed texts, people have shown for example that some neurons fire when you are talking of specific historical periods or locations on Earth. However, I don't think that the trasformative character is enough to override the other factors, and therefore in the end it won't/shouldn't be considered fair use IMHO.
- w4ffl35 3y agoWhat if the LLM is running locally and doing all of these things rather than hosted on a webserver which is serving the content?
- bonzini 3y agoIt doesn't matter, if everything else stays the same what matters is what it's used for. If it's used to make money, it would certainly hurt claims of fair use—maybe not for those that do the training, but for those that use it.
- w4ffl35 3y ago> If it's used to make money, it would certainly hurt claims of fair use What if a human manually searches all those articles and transcribes / summarizes them to me in the way ChatGPT did?
- tbcj 3y agoI don’t think the original point being made was that NYT wasn’t justified in bringing the action. The point that was being made was the suit would be ultimately meaningless in the long term even if it was successful in the short term. There is a potentially more significant risk in the future that this suit will not protect against because of the reasons enumerated by the author. While the author is speculating, the law struggles with technology and adapting to change, which makes their prediction useful because it does highlight the problems that are coming that can’t be readily mitigated through legal precedent.
- paulddraper 3y agoCorrect, a_wild_dandan argues that the outcome of this suit makes no pragmatic difference.
- NotMichaelBay 3y ago> it's clearly not helping their market value if people are checking on ChatGPT instead of reading a NYT article. People are not using ChatGPT as a replacement for current news, and because of hallucinations, no one should be using it for past news either. I wouldn't remotely call ChatGPT a competitor of NYT traffic, like I would Reuters or other news outlets.
- jprete 3y agoThe intended result is clearly to supplant other information sources in favor of people getting their information from ChatGPT. Why should it matter to legality that the tech isn't good enough for the goal?
- stale2002 3y ago> T. Why should it matter to legality that the tech isn't good enough for the goal? Because if it is not good enough, then it is not a market substitute. The laws cares if it is a market substitute and if there are damages. If it sucks, then there aren't damages, which matters for the 4th factor of fair use.