3 ms·
Why is it unreasonable to request they retrain without their content exactly?
by endisneigh 3y ago
Why is it unreasonable to request they retrain without their content exactly?
- sidcool 3y agoI don't think it's practical. It would almost be like training from scratch.
- endisneigh 3y agoWhy is that their problem? If they didn’t get permission to use copyrighted content why is it unreasonable for retraining to occur without their content? And please spare me the humans learn too nonsense. Computers are not humans.
- unyttigfjelltol 3y agoHumans mostly don't have the ability to reproduce articles verbatim years later and those that can certainly don't have the capacity to serve copies and derivatives to the entire free world ... and even if they did they would quote and paraphrase selectively and non-competitively with attribution to the source. LLMs do all the functions humans can't with none of the guardrails or attribution.
- brookst 3y agoWould it be reasonable for NYT to demand that all humans forget anything learned from NYT articles? The NYT is asserting a drastic expansion of copyright, to cover not just the specific expression of ideas but the ideas themselves. We should be wary of AI companies, and copyright is woefully unprepared for our new world, but the answer is not to change the system so creators retain infinite control over who can even remember their work.
- endisneigh 3y agoComputers are not humans. Why do people continue to make these inane comparisons? Show me a human can remember even half of what GPT4 was trained on and I’ll concede the point.
- brookst 3y agoHow many terabytes of data have you been exposed to in your life? Songs, movies, books, day to day vision and memories, etc. Those all influenced you. You may not have perfect memory, but neither does GPT4. You may rememeber a tiny subset of that data perfectly, just like GPT4. The inanity here is in seeking to extend copyright beyond reproduction and into learning and cultural accretion. It’s crazy to me that anyone would look at the past 100 years of copyright and think that what we need publishers with legal control over reading.
- Ukv 3y agoFull retraining is prohibitively expensive, especially if it has to be done for cases like this where NYT initially permitted automated processing through robots.txt at the time of training but then changed their mind upon realizing the potential market in licensing content to developers. To my knowledge there also hasn't been any successful training of capable LLMs on just public domain data. Machine learning, including foundation models and web-scale pretraining, has widespread uncontroversially beneficial applications (defect detection, language translation, spam/DDoS filtering, agriculture/weather/logistics modelling, etc.). The federal government has invested billions in AI, and is desperately trying to prevent China from taking the lead. NYT aren't really in a position here to dig their heels in with "not our problem if our deletion demand makes training AI in the US infeasible" - they likely know that's not going to fly, and are instead using it to prompt negotiation for licensing their content.