4 ms·

NYT vs. GPT: Microsoft finds itself on the other side of an industry

44 points by jatwork 3y ago

dataflow 3y ago
Don't news publishers have an even harder time making a case here than (say) software publishers? At least with software, there are explicit licenses governing how you're presumably allowed to use them. Is the New York Times going to claim people are agreeing to a license before reading their news?
- ziddoap 3y ago
  >Is the New York Times going to claim people are agreeing to a license before reading their news? They don't need to. They have implicit, automatic copyright on the published original works. The lawsuit shows examples of GPT using the NYT work verbatim.
  - dagaci 3y ago
    To discover than a particular LLM is able to output verbatim a sections of NYT works when queried in certain ways is different from explicitly publishing a set of NYC works... i think. OpenAI does not distribute it models, so the violation of copywrite if found to be a violation will be limited to the amount of people who queried the LLM in the same way that NYT did.
    - ziddoap 3y ago
      My comment was directed solely at the part I quoted regarding licenses -- the NYT does not need to claim anything about licenses because they have implicit copyright. How that copyright shakes out in the end (what your statements focus on) is yet to be determined.
  - dataflow 3y ago
    You completely missed my point. I'm saying that between "you're violating copyright law" and "you're violating copyright law and you supposedly agreed you a license that contractually prevented you from doing this", the second sounds like a stronger claim.
    - nicklecompte 3y ago
      The reason the current license ecosystem exists for open-source software is that there's a huge difference between owning the code and owning the binary distribution. This difference doesn't exist for newspaper articles (or books, visual art, etc). Even technical manuals are not machines in the way that software is. The fact that software is both text and tool means the legal issues are different and need clarification. So existing copyright law was sufficient for written media, but didn't quite work for software. OTOH it seems that GPL-style copyleft licenses are being used more by writers and artists, so it's not like these issues exist in a vacuum. I expect copyleft will be more appealing to artists going forward given Midjourney et al.
  - NemoNobody 3y ago
    I understand their claim to copyright of recent material but the real reason so much of their information was used is bc we are talking about the, essentially historical, NYT archives that date back to likely the early era of the newspaper itself. I don't think they should have a right to the records of people who lived before simply bc they underpaid, over worked human journalists to exploit their creativity - largely to make the "Newspaper Barons" rich. I don't think they ought to have implicit, automatic copyright on older stuff. How old is my only debate. What good is old news really? Real old is good for college papers but news from 4 years ago... who cares?
Biologist123 3y ago
This battle will be fascinating.
- thecleaner 3y ago
  No it wont lead to anywhere. They will just get rid of the NYT bits of the corpus, then settle or just flat out not care if they lose. Transformers are relatively easy to train they arent GANs, the bottleneck is hardware and OpenAI has those bits sorted out.
  - theonemind 3y ago
    Presumably, the outcome will start the series of legal precedents regarding copyright and GPT (and other AI stuff) training potentially going far beyond OpenAI and NYT.
  - nicklecompte 3y ago
    In the lawsuit, NYT pointed out that their articles are the third-most used source in GPT-3, behind Wikipedia and the US patent office. We don't know what they used for GPT-4 but I imagine NYT is still very prominent. High-quality newspaper articles are valuable for training LLMs because they contain good prose and an enormous variety of factual information. They can't be replaced by throwing in a bunch of Reddit comments and hoping for the best. "NYT bits of the corpus" is understating things - I imagine getting rid of NYT articles would significantly impact the overall quality of GPT-4's responses in many unexpected domains.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      I very much doubt it'd be a problem. OpenAI's valuation is such a large multiple of NYT that they can afford to buy out a dozen or so publishers of NYT's valuation to get content to replace (or "just" license content from far more) if NYT itself isn't willing to play ball cheaply enough. The NYT might be better than average, but it's not so special that you can't replace it. The long-term effect if NYT wins this case will be that the "established" players and companies with deep pockets will get a massive moat protecting them against open models and new entrants - in the long run it might well be well worth whatever a loss will cost them.

44 points by jatwork 3y ago

Don't news publishers have an even harder time making a case here than (say) software publishers? At least with software, there are explicit licenses governing how you're presumably allowed to use them. Is the New York Times going to claim people are agreeing to a license before reading their news?

ziddoap 3y ago
>Is the New York Times going to claim people are agreeing to a license before reading their news? They don't need to. They have implicit, automatic copyright on the published original works. The lawsuit shows examples of GPT using the NYT work verbatim.
- dagaci 3y ago
  To discover than a particular LLM is able to output verbatim a sections of NYT works when queried in certain ways is different from explicitly publishing a set of NYC works... i think. OpenAI does not distribute it models, so the violation of copywrite if found to be a violation will be limited to the amount of people who queried the LLM in the same way that NYT did.
  - ziddoap 3y ago
    My comment was directed solely at the part I quoted regarding licenses -- the NYT does not need to claim anything about licenses because they have implicit copyright. How that copyright shakes out in the end (what your statements focus on) is yet to be determined.
- dataflow 3y ago
  You completely missed my point. I'm saying that between "you're violating copyright law" and "you're violating copyright law and you supposedly agreed you a license that contractually prevented you from doing this", the second sounds like a stronger claim.
  - nicklecompte 3y ago
    The reason the current license ecosystem exists for open-source software is that there's a huge difference between owning the code and owning the binary distribution. This difference doesn't exist for newspaper articles (or books, visual art, etc). Even technical manuals are not machines in the way that software is. The fact that software is both text and tool means the legal issues are different and need clarification. So existing copyright law was sufficient for written media, but didn't quite work for software. OTOH it seems that GPL-style copyleft licenses are being used more by writers and artists, so it's not like these issues exist in a vacuum. I expect copyleft will be more appealing to artists going forward given Midjourney et al.
- NemoNobody 3y ago
  I understand their claim to copyright of recent material but the real reason so much of their information was used is bc we are talking about the, essentially historical, NYT archives that date back to likely the early era of the newspaper itself. I don't think they should have a right to the records of people who lived before simply bc they underpaid, over worked human journalists to exploit their creativity - largely to make the "Newspaper Barons" rich. I don't think they ought to have implicit, automatic copyright on older stuff. How old is my only debate. What good is old news really? Real old is good for college papers but news from 4 years ago... who cares?

Biologist123 3y ago

This battle will be fascinating.

thecleaner 3y ago
No it wont lead to anywhere. They will just get rid of the NYT bits of the corpus, then settle or just flat out not care if they lose. Transformers are relatively easy to train they arent GANs, the bottleneck is hardware and OpenAI has those bits sorted out.
- theonemind 3y ago
  Presumably, the outcome will start the series of legal precedents regarding copyright and GPT (and other AI stuff) training potentially going far beyond OpenAI and NYT.
- nicklecompte 3y ago
  In the lawsuit, NYT pointed out that their articles are the third-most used source in GPT-3, behind Wikipedia and the US patent office. We don't know what they used for GPT-4 but I imagine NYT is still very prominent. High-quality newspaper articles are valuable for training LLMs because they contain good prose and an enormous variety of factual information. They can't be replaced by throwing in a bunch of Reddit comments and hoping for the best. "NYT bits of the corpus" is understating things - I imagine getting rid of NYT articles would significantly impact the overall quality of GPT-4's responses in many unexpected domains.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    I very much doubt it'd be a problem. OpenAI's valuation is such a large multiple of NYT that they can afford to buy out a dozen or so publishers of NYT's valuation to get content to replace (or "just" license content from far more) if NYT itself isn't willing to play ball cheaply enough. The NYT might be better than average, but it's not so special that you can't replace it. The long-term effect if NYT wins this case will be that the "established" players and companies with deep pockets will get a massive moat protecting them against open models and new entrants - in the long run it might well be well worth whatever a loss will cost them.