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There has already been one court decision that pushes against a blanket fair use protection for AI training: https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2023/10/13/judg

by dahart 3y ago

There has already been one court decision that pushes against a blanket fair use protection for AI training: https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2023/10/13/judge-bibas-issues-1st-ruling-on-how-fair-use-applies-in-ai-training-after-andy-warhol-foundation-decision/ https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2023/10/13/judge-bibas-i... And I think there are dozens of unfinished AI copyright infringement lawsuits... with likely more to come, I speculate. https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2023/12/27/master-list-of-lawsuits-v-ai-chatgpt-openai-microsoft-meta-midjourney-other-ai-cos/ https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2023/12/27/master-list-o... https://heathermeeker.com/ai-copyright-et-al-litigation-scoreboard-sorted-by-complaint-date/ https://heathermeeker.com/ai-copyright-et-al-litigation-scor...

satvikpendem 3y ago
I don't think that first link means what you think it means: > Ultimately, Judge Bibas denied summary judgment and ruled the case should proceed to trial. > Judge Bibas cautioned against “overreading” the Supreme Court’s recent fair use decision in Andy Warhol Foundation, in which the Court limited the weight to give a defendant’s transformative purpose if it is commercial and substantially similar in purpose as the plaintiff’s work. > "Ross’s uses were undoubtedly commercial. And one of its goals was to compete with Westlaw. Thomson Reuters contends that this commercial use weighs heavily against finding fair use. [...]" All that the judge is saying is that previous rulings are not comparable to AI related ones. It is also difficult to see how ChatGPT is competing with NYT, as ChatGPT does not generate (actual, real) news, because it cannot interact with the world as journalists can. Maybe image generators could but a similar judgment stated that it was difficult to see how AI generated images were similar to an existing artist's.
- richardwhiuk 3y ago
  It's clearly competing with NYT if people get their news from NYT via ChatGPT instead of getting it from NYT directly. Otherwise you could argue that if I copy and paste the NYT articles onto my own website, because I'm not doing any journalism, I'm not competing with the NYT - which is clearly ludicrous.
  - MeImCounting 3y ago
    So then it needs to be proved that real people actually cancelled their NYT subscription in favor of reading articles from chatGPT. This is incredibly unlikely for several reasons least of which is GPTs training cutoff, the need to copy past several paragraphs of the article to get GPT to finish it among other reasons.
    - dahart 3y ago
      Fortunately, that’s not how copyright works. Burden of proof is on OpenAI to justify their copying without permission, they don’t get to copy anything and then demand that anyone who doesn’t like it prove that financial damage was done first before they stop. Financial damage does count under copyright, but is not required to win an infringement claim. Courts or the copyright office might decide that AI can count as fair use, or they might continue to allow suits every time an AI spits out verbatim copyrighted work in violation of the law, or we might get some entirely new criteria for copyrights. It’s going to be interesting.
      - MeImCounting 3y ago
        To be honest I really dont understand how copyright works. I have read through the first several pages of the NYT case PDF but it still didnt make much sense to me. Is the issue just that GPT is able to repeat the article word for word or is the issue about the article being in the training data at all? If its not about losing business what is it about? Could you or someone else expand a bit on what exactly the problem is and maybe even speculate as to potential outcomes?
        dahart 3y ago
        This is a good question, and I suspect the answer is some of both, but the lawsuit is very specifically claiming that ChatGPT is “memorizing” and reproducing NYT articles verbatim, and this is clearly in violation of the law. I suspect they’re also trying to push on the issue of it being illegal to train AI on the NYT archive, but that’s a bigger and more difficult question. The issue of verbatim reproduction makes a clear legal case, which is why they’re relying on that first, and letting that lead to the broader discussion. Exhibit J in the suit is titled: “One hundred examples of GPT-4 memorizing content from the New York Times”.
- dahart 3y ago
  > It is also difficult to see how ChatGPT is competing with NYT Why? NYT paid for and put work into their writing, and they do make some money on holding the archive of their work. Not everything they publish is breaking current events either. Chatgpt does not have to come up with new news in order to compete with NYT archive, their editors, their writing style, or their content, among other possibilities. AI’s very purpose is to absorb the content and style of its training data and be able to reproduce it more cheaply than the original. It doesn’t seem difficult at all to imagine many ways this does direct and indirect harm to NYT, or anyone who had to put effort or money into creating something valuable.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Style and similar sorts of content is not necessarily copyrightable. I could write in the style of some author a similar story to one of theirs, like a murder mystery in the style of Agatha Christie, but that doesn't make it copyright infringement.
    - dahart 3y ago
      Yeah that’s true, good point. It’s only infringement if you string enough of the exact same words together verbatim as the originals / training data. Same is true of content. The NNs aren’t yet good enough to avoid memorizing individual training samples, but something tells me they will be very soon.
- michaelt 3y ago
  > It is also difficult to see how ChatGPT is competing with NYT If I'm interested in Dick Cheney shooting someone by accident, and previously I would have googled that and been sent to NYT reporting on the incident (and get shown some ads or sold a subscription) but instead I ask ChatGPT - that seems like a competing product to me. And fair use is a multi-pronged test - ChatGPT's use of the data is clearly of a commercial nature, and the portion of the copyrighted work used for training is presumably 100%. So while Wikipedia can quote an NYT article (being both noncommercial and a short excerpt) the court could well consider LLM training more in the nature of music sampling, where at times it's been held that even minuscule two second excerpts, distorted and mixed in with lots of other music, still need to be licensed.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    And what exactly would ChatGPT tell you? It'd make up some story about that person, but it's not real news. I don't see how that's competing with newspapers at all.
    - michaelt 3y ago
      The fact something is not good does not mean it's not competition. I may think TikTok is vastly inferior to the National Geographic TV, but they're still competing for eyeballs and ad sales.

by dahart 3y ago

satvikpendem 3y ago

I don't think that first link means what you think it means: > Ultimately, Judge Bibas denied summary judgment and ruled the case should proceed to trial. > Judge Bibas cautioned against “overreading” the Supreme Court’s recent fair use decision in Andy Warhol Foundation, in which the Court limited the weight to give a defendant’s transformative purpose if it is commercial and substantially similar in purpose as the plaintiff’s work. > "Ross’s uses were undoubtedly commercial. And one of its goals was to compete with Westlaw. Thomson Reuters contends that this commercial use weighs heavily against finding fair use. [...]" All that the judge is saying is that previous rulings are not comparable to AI related ones. It is also difficult to see how ChatGPT is competing with NYT, as ChatGPT does not generate (actual, real) news, because it cannot interact with the world as journalists can. Maybe image generators could but a similar judgment stated that it was difficult to see how AI generated images were similar to an existing artist's.

richardwhiuk 3y ago
It's clearly competing with NYT if people get their news from NYT via ChatGPT instead of getting it from NYT directly. Otherwise you could argue that if I copy and paste the NYT articles onto my own website, because I'm not doing any journalism, I'm not competing with the NYT - which is clearly ludicrous.
- MeImCounting 3y ago
  So then it needs to be proved that real people actually cancelled their NYT subscription in favor of reading articles from chatGPT. This is incredibly unlikely for several reasons least of which is GPTs training cutoff, the need to copy past several paragraphs of the article to get GPT to finish it among other reasons.
  - dahart 3y ago
    Fortunately, that’s not how copyright works. Burden of proof is on OpenAI to justify their copying without permission, they don’t get to copy anything and then demand that anyone who doesn’t like it prove that financial damage was done first before they stop. Financial damage does count under copyright, but is not required to win an infringement claim. Courts or the copyright office might decide that AI can count as fair use, or they might continue to allow suits every time an AI spits out verbatim copyrighted work in violation of the law, or we might get some entirely new criteria for copyrights. It’s going to be interesting.
    - MeImCounting 3y ago
      To be honest I really dont understand how copyright works. I have read through the first several pages of the NYT case PDF but it still didnt make much sense to me. Is the issue just that GPT is able to repeat the article word for word or is the issue about the article being in the training data at all? If its not about losing business what is it about? Could you or someone else expand a bit on what exactly the problem is and maybe even speculate as to potential outcomes?
      - dahart 3y ago
        This is a good question, and I suspect the answer is some of both, but the lawsuit is very specifically claiming that ChatGPT is “memorizing” and reproducing NYT articles verbatim, and this is clearly in violation of the law. I suspect they’re also trying to push on the issue of it being illegal to train AI on the NYT archive, but that’s a bigger and more difficult question. The issue of verbatim reproduction makes a clear legal case, which is why they’re relying on that first, and letting that lead to the broader discussion. Exhibit J in the suit is titled: “One hundred examples of GPT-4 memorizing content from the New York Times”.
dahart 3y ago
> It is also difficult to see how ChatGPT is competing with NYT Why? NYT paid for and put work into their writing, and they do make some money on holding the archive of their work. Not everything they publish is breaking current events either. Chatgpt does not have to come up with new news in order to compete with NYT archive, their editors, their writing style, or their content, among other possibilities. AI’s very purpose is to absorb the content and style of its training data and be able to reproduce it more cheaply than the original. It doesn’t seem difficult at all to imagine many ways this does direct and indirect harm to NYT, or anyone who had to put effort or money into creating something valuable.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Style and similar sorts of content is not necessarily copyrightable. I could write in the style of some author a similar story to one of theirs, like a murder mystery in the style of Agatha Christie, but that doesn't make it copyright infringement.
  - dahart 3y ago
    Yeah that’s true, good point. It’s only infringement if you string enough of the exact same words together verbatim as the originals / training data. Same is true of content. The NNs aren’t yet good enough to avoid memorizing individual training samples, but something tells me they will be very soon.
michaelt 3y ago
> It is also difficult to see how ChatGPT is competing with NYT If I'm interested in Dick Cheney shooting someone by accident, and previously I would have googled that and been sent to NYT reporting on the incident (and get shown some ads or sold a subscription) but instead I ask ChatGPT - that seems like a competing product to me. And fair use is a multi-pronged test - ChatGPT's use of the data is clearly of a commercial nature, and the portion of the copyrighted work used for training is presumably 100%. So while Wikipedia can quote an NYT article (being both noncommercial and a short excerpt) the court could well consider LLM training more in the nature of music sampling, where at times it's been held that even minuscule two second excerpts, distorted and mixed in with lots of other music, still need to be licensed.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  And what exactly would ChatGPT tell you? It'd make up some story about that person, but it's not real news. I don't see how that's competing with newspapers at all.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    The fact something is not good does not mean it's not competition. I may think TikTok is vastly inferior to the National Geographic TV, but they're still competing for eyeballs and ad sales.