8 ms·

> To keep things simple, let's say I never regurgitate chunks of verbatim NYT articles, maybe quite short snippets. You just described Google. When you think a

> To keep things simple, let's say I never regurgitate chunks of verbatim NYT articles, maybe quite short snippets. You just described Google. When you think about it, it's surprising that Google is legal. However, it is well established that what Google does is perfectly legal. Remember that internally Google keeps and uses complete verbatim copies of every web page they index. Yes, Google offers a link to the source. If OpenAI did the same, even if only 0.1% of people clicked on the links and NYTimes hardly got any revenue from it, would that make it legal in your eyes? What if they implemented a system that detected when it was outputting a verbatim copy of something and simply paraphrased it? NYTimes clearly doesn't have copyright on paraphrased versions of their articles. I think it would be pretty silly if the government forced them to do that as it wouldn't make any practical difference to anyone.

inetknght 3y ago
> However, it is well established that what Google does is perfectly legal. Google has a wide range of products and shakedowns. Not all of them are "perfectly" legal: Google is being challenged in court over some of their shakedowns and products practices.
- modeless 3y ago
  I am clearly talking about the web search engine in the context of copyright. Other products or legal concerns like antitrust are completely irrelevant here.
graeme 3y ago
Any publisher can opt out of google. Publisher also have substantial control over titles and snippets shown in google, whether an article appears in google news, etc Paraphrasing is also known as cloning and is often a copyright violation
- modeless 3y ago
  Copyright law doesn't mention opt outs or search engine snippet controls. It's not clear to me that robots.txt is the singular thing that makes Google legal. In US copyright law facts cannot be copyrighted, so copyright on factual content like newspaper articles is limited. Simply replacing a few words wouldn't work, but I am certain that GPT-4 is capable of paraphrasing factual content at a level that would not be considered infringement if a human did it.
  - freejazz 3y ago
    >Copyright law doesn't mention opt outs or search engine snippet controls. It's not clear to me that robots.txt is the singular thing that makes Google legal. Genuinely - what are you talking about besides your own assumptions? you just assume everything google does is legal and therefore any one else doing anything arguably similar must also be legal? Without regard for factual details that do matter to copyright law? Such as license?? Your own description of copyright law here is very stunted - you can't paraphrase articles of the NYTimes and call it a fair use. You can report on what the NYtimes reports on... because that's what news is.
    - modeless 3y ago
      > you just assume everything google does is legal Not an assumption. This is well established. They've been doing it for twenty years! > Without regard for factual details that do matter to copyright law? Such as license?? What license? Google doesn't in general have or need an explicit license to crawl websites and neither does OpenAI.
      - freejazz 3y ago
        >Not an assumption. This is well established. They've been doing it for twenty years! It's not at all well-established. How many anti-trust suits is Google facing now? Your proposition defies common sense. >What license? Google doesn't in general have or need an explicit license to crawl websites and neither does OpenAI. It's not the crawling the website that OpenAI did that it needs a license for... why bother conversing if you are going to be this obtuse?
- mawise 3y ago
  > Any publisher can opt out of google. Can they? Here's reference to a legal fight where Google scraped song lyrics from a lyrics website, and presented the lyrics verbatim directly to users (bypassing the original site and the ads that allowed that site to operate) https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-lawsuit-google-922666/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-law...
caconym_ 3y ago
You took that quote out of context and missed the broader point in the process. The snippets provided in regular search results cannot generally replace the substance of the full articles they link to, while that's the whole point of GP's hypothetical website—it simply doesn't reproduce large chunks of text verbatim, presumably to avoid copyright infringement claims in the hypothetical's frame, and in GP's rhetorical frame to present an analogy with the information-laundering powers of LLMs that their creators claim make their exploitation of unlicensed training data fair use. The whole point of a search engine (as we've classically known them) is to index the web and respond to queries with a list of links that you will inspect and click through on. The whole point of an LLM chatbot tool is to eliminate those inspecting and clicking-through steps, becoming a one-stop shop for content whose substance was created by someone else. That's also the whole point of GP's hypothetical, which is why it works as an analogy. --- There are substantially better arguments for search engines being legitimate fair use. Consider, for example, transformation. AI defenders will argue that these systems are transformative because they reshuffle elements of their input in their output, but that's clearly a much weaker form of transformation than one in which the transformed work has an entirely different nature and purpose, i.e. search engines vs. the results they return. Ultimately these technicality-based "nuh uh" arguments aren't going to save the practice of training AI on unlicensed data, because they are incompatible with the spirit of copyright law even if the novel nature of these technologies means the letter of said law can't quite nail them down yet. If these arguments do succeed, it will be because the judicial/regulatory environment in which they were applied has been corrupted by capital.
- 8note 3y ago
  A search engine takes an input string, a corpus of text, and returns a series of text that best comes next after the input string. An LLM takes an input string a corpus of text, and returns a series of text that best comes after the next input string. To get a paragraph of output, you run the search over and over again Both the search and LLM reshuffle the inputs to the outputs. If I'm describing the purpose of the LLM, it's got a wide number of usages. "Making my resume look more professional" or "be a crud api" or "reformat my ask into a api call to X service" or "give me a timeline of events surrounding Y with source links"
riskable 3y ago
The reason why Google keeping entire digital copies of other people's copyrighted works is legal is because copyright is all about distribution rights. Any person can possess the entire works of Disney (without paying for them), for example and as long as they do not distribute those works they're 100% in the clear. Possession is not a crime when it comes to copyright. It's not like physical things (e.g. drugs or guns) at all. This is why comparing copyright violations to theft is silly. ChatGPT can absolutely keep verbatim copies of the entire works of basically anything and not run afoul of the law. When it regurgitates a small part of an article that's covered by fair use in theory but the truth is that fair use can only be determined by a judge in a court of law when someone is sued. It cannot be determined with any sort of certainty ahead of time. It's a legal defense, nothing more. Summarizing content has been legal forever as well (see the other posts here talking about Cliff Notes and some similar products). That's not even fair use that's just like, people's opinions, man (legally speaking). I don't think the NYT will get what they want out of this at all.
- fennecbutt 3y ago
  >Any person can possess the entire works of Disney (without paying for them) Man thinks piracy is legal

inetknght 3y ago

> However, it is well established that what Google does is perfectly legal. Google has a wide range of products and shakedowns. Not all of them are "perfectly" legal: Google is being challenged in court over some of their shakedowns and products practices.

modeless 3y ago
I am clearly talking about the web search engine in the context of copyright. Other products or legal concerns like antitrust are completely irrelevant here.

graeme 3y ago

Any publisher can opt out of google. Publisher also have substantial control over titles and snippets shown in google, whether an article appears in google news, etc Paraphrasing is also known as cloning and is often a copyright violation

modeless 3y ago
Copyright law doesn't mention opt outs or search engine snippet controls. It's not clear to me that robots.txt is the singular thing that makes Google legal. In US copyright law facts cannot be copyrighted, so copyright on factual content like newspaper articles is limited. Simply replacing a few words wouldn't work, but I am certain that GPT-4 is capable of paraphrasing factual content at a level that would not be considered infringement if a human did it.
- freejazz 3y ago
  >Copyright law doesn't mention opt outs or search engine snippet controls. It's not clear to me that robots.txt is the singular thing that makes Google legal. Genuinely - what are you talking about besides your own assumptions? you just assume everything google does is legal and therefore any one else doing anything arguably similar must also be legal? Without regard for factual details that do matter to copyright law? Such as license?? Your own description of copyright law here is very stunted - you can't paraphrase articles of the NYTimes and call it a fair use. You can report on what the NYtimes reports on... because that's what news is.
  - modeless 3y ago
    > you just assume everything google does is legal Not an assumption. This is well established. They've been doing it for twenty years! > Without regard for factual details that do matter to copyright law? Such as license?? What license? Google doesn't in general have or need an explicit license to crawl websites and neither does OpenAI.
    - freejazz 3y ago
      >Not an assumption. This is well established. They've been doing it for twenty years! It's not at all well-established. How many anti-trust suits is Google facing now? Your proposition defies common sense. >What license? Google doesn't in general have or need an explicit license to crawl websites and neither does OpenAI. It's not the crawling the website that OpenAI did that it needs a license for... why bother conversing if you are going to be this obtuse?
mawise 3y ago
> Any publisher can opt out of google. Can they? Here's reference to a legal fight where Google scraped song lyrics from a lyrics website, and presented the lyrics verbatim directly to users (bypassing the original site and the ads that allowed that site to operate) https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-lawsuit-google-922666/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-law...

caconym_ 3y ago

You took that quote out of context and missed the broader point in the process. The snippets provided in regular search results cannot generally replace the substance of the full articles they link to, while that's the whole point of GP's hypothetical website—it simply doesn't reproduce large chunks of text verbatim, presumably to avoid copyright infringement claims in the hypothetical's frame, and in GP's rhetorical frame to present an analogy with the information-laundering powers of LLMs that their creators claim make their exploitation of unlicensed training data fair use. The whole point of a search engine (as we've classically known them) is to index the web and respond to queries with a list of links that you will inspect and click through on. The whole point of an LLM chatbot tool is to eliminate those inspecting and clicking-through steps, becoming a one-stop shop for content whose substance was created by someone else. That's also the whole point of GP's hypothetical, which is why it works as an analogy. --- There are substantially better arguments for search engines being legitimate fair use. Consider, for example, transformation. AI defenders will argue that these systems are transformative because they reshuffle elements of their input in their output, but that's clearly a much weaker form of transformation than one in which the transformed work has an entirely different nature and purpose, i.e. search engines vs. the results they return. Ultimately these technicality-based "nuh uh" arguments aren't going to save the practice of training AI on unlicensed data, because they are incompatible with the spirit of copyright law even if the novel nature of these technologies means the letter of said law can't quite nail them down yet. If these arguments do succeed, it will be because the judicial/regulatory environment in which they were applied has been corrupted by capital.

8note 3y ago
A search engine takes an input string, a corpus of text, and returns a series of text that best comes next after the input string. An LLM takes an input string a corpus of text, and returns a series of text that best comes after the next input string. To get a paragraph of output, you run the search over and over again Both the search and LLM reshuffle the inputs to the outputs. If I'm describing the purpose of the LLM, it's got a wide number of usages. "Making my resume look more professional" or "be a crud api" or "reformat my ask into a api call to X service" or "give me a timeline of events surrounding Y with source links"

riskable 3y ago

The reason why Google keeping entire digital copies of other people's copyrighted works is legal is because copyright is all about distribution rights. Any person can possess the entire works of Disney (without paying for them), for example and as long as they do not distribute those works they're 100% in the clear. Possession is not a crime when it comes to copyright. It's not like physical things (e.g. drugs or guns) at all. This is why comparing copyright violations to theft is silly. ChatGPT can absolutely keep verbatim copies of the entire works of basically anything and not run afoul of the law. When it regurgitates a small part of an article that's covered by fair use in theory but the truth is that fair use can only be determined by a judge in a court of law when someone is sued. It cannot be determined with any sort of certainty ahead of time. It's a legal defense, nothing more. Summarizing content has been legal forever as well (see the other posts here talking about Cliff Notes and some similar products). That's not even fair use that's just like, people's opinions, man (legally speaking). I don't think the NYT will get what they want out of this at all.

fennecbutt 3y ago
>Any person can possess the entire works of Disney (without paying for them) Man thinks piracy is legal