13 ms·

The New York Times Launches a Strong Case Against Microsoft and OpenAI

205 points by andy99 3y ago

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
Without going into the merits, maybe the best thing about this is that the NYT has the money and stature to hire good lawyers and fight this all the way to the Supreme Court. It'll benefit everyone if the fair use question is decided definitively sooner than later. I could see OpenAI settling, but it's in NYT's interest not to since it's not just OpenAI, they're just the most egregious ("we can use your copyrighted works for our model but you can't use our uncopyrightable output for your model").
- solomatov 3y ago
  It's not a fair use question, it's a question about models reproducing the article text almost verbatim. (IANAL)
  - brigadier132 3y ago
    If it's fair use reproducing the article text verbatim is fine.
    - andy99 3y ago
      What is "it"? Training can be fair use, i.e. updating weights incrementally based on predicted next token probabilities. And I (not a lawyer) think that if a broadly trained foundation model can recall some verbatim text, that doesn't mean the model is infringing. It seems like the lawsuit here is talking about specific NYT related functionality, like retrieving the text in new articles. That essentially has nothing to do with training and running a foundation LLM, it's about some specific shenanigans with NYT content, and it's legal status would appear to have nothing to do with whether training is fair use.
      - gremlinunderway 3y ago
        Good luck trying to explain "updating weights incrementally based on predicted next token probabilities" to completely non-technical lawyers and judges.
        lesuorac 3y ago
        Good thing they don't have to. As I've said before, this slight of hand to talk about the case as-if its about training is a great move by OpenAi; however the case is more than just about training. NYT is alleging that OpenAI maintains a database of NYT works and refers to it verbatim (per-prompt) as part of the ChatGPT software and not via some pre-trained wieghts. This is akin to having to explain to non-technical lawyers and judges how crypto works. In the FTX case it became irrelevant because you can just nail them on fraud for using deposited funds for non-allowed reasons.
        simonw 3y ago
        I didn't see NYT allege that - their lawsuit explains pre-training pretty accurately I thought.
        lesuorac 3y ago
        Its buried on page 37 - #108. There probably are other examples in the lawsuit but this is sufficent. > Synthetic search applications built on the GPT LLMs, including Bing Chat and Browse with Bing for ChatGPT, display extensive excerpts or paraphrases of the contents of search results, including Times content, that may not have been included in the model’s training set. The “grounding” technique employed by these products includes receiving a prompt from a user, copying Times content relating to the prompt from the internet, providing the prompt together with the copied Times content as additional context for the LLM, and having the LLM stitch together paraphrases or quotes from the copied Times content to create natural-language substitutes that serve the same informative purpose as the original. In some cases, Defendants’ models simply spit out several paragraphs of The Times’s articles. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68117049/1/the-new-york-times-company-v-microsoft-corporation/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68117049/1/the-new-york...
    - solomatov 3y ago
      Yep, you seem to be right. Google stores the quotes from pages, and it's fair use. Again, I am not a lawyer, and didn't think about this.
    - simonw 3y ago
      This is argued extensively in the lawsuit document. A key argument the NYT is making is that part of the definition of fair use is not producing a product that competes with the original. They argue that ChatGPT et al DO compete with the original, in a way that harms the NYT business model. One example they give: ChatGPT can reproduce recommendations made by the Wirecutter, without including the affiliate links that form the Wirecutter's main source of revenue - page 48 of https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...
      - shkkmo 3y ago
        There are plenty of other services that strip affiliate links from content for users, such as ad blockers. Notably, in both those cases, the user is specifically asking for what wirecutter thinks. To me, that makes the infringing behavior clearly the fault of the user of the tool, not the tool itself. When I saw this lawsuit announced, I assumed that large portions content were being reproduced in response to generic queries. That isn't the case, every example I've seen from this lawsuit has prompts where the user specifically asks for the content. To me, any fault and liability rests on the user here.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    Fair use is a key defense for OpenAI. The article also mentions the idea that the model is merely extracting (uncopyrightable) facts, which is interesting, but might be a tough one to prove since LLMs have no way of establishing what are facts, and don't return facts by design.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
  I have less optimism. The article says NYT was trying to negotiate with microsoft and openai for licensing, so they may be inclined to settle ("just give us a zillion bucks a year and we're cool"). And if they don't settle, then questions like this often seem to be decided by technicalities that don't really matter to all the similar observers hoping for a broader ruling.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    That isn't a great deal for OpenAI, since everyone will be at their door asking for licence fees in that case. In this case it's all about the technicalities.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
fallingknife 3y ago
> Here, Microsoft and OpenAI haven’t just used The Times’ content to teach the AI how to communicate, they’ve launched news-specific services and features that ingest both archived content and brand new articles from The Times. What is this referring to? AFAIK reporting on real time news is beyond the capability of an LLM, and a Google search doesn't turn up any news reporting feature. > But the hallucinations aren’t facts; they’re lies. And even if the defendants prevail in arguing that the AIs are mostly just providing people with unprotectable facts, there’s very little to shield them from liability for the lies, both with respect to trademark dilution claims, but also with respect to potential libel or privacy-related claims that might be brought by other individuals. This seems really weak because libel requires damages. It would be incredibly hard for the NYT to prove any damages from ChatGPT lying about it. Also libel requires "actual malice" which means the libeler needs to know that their statements are false. Good luck showing that with an LLM.
- vulcan01 3y ago
  > libel requires "actual malice" which means the libeler needs to know that their statements are false Creators of LLMs (OpenAI in this case) should know that their LLMs regularly provide false statements.
  - danielrhodes 3y ago
    Telling a lie is not illegal by itself. Telling a lie with the intent of harming someone, especially their reputation, is another story.
  - diggan 3y ago
    One could argue that the LLM are not making any statements at all, as that would require intent and purpose beyond what they can (currently) do. The LLM outputs the most likely token to appear next, based on what it learned during training. This could be anything, and it happens to generate some text that sometimes looks like statements, but is just text generated by lots of math. Of course I'm not actually arguing this, and have no horses in this race. But not hard to imagine that someone could make this argument and also believe it.
gumballindie 3y ago
Great progress. It would be great if open source developers would group up and sue them into oblivion.
sam_goody 3y ago
Let's imagine that they settle out of court. And then in a few years, as AI improves, the NYT relies on AI to write some of their articles (or they rely on AI to proofread and edit their articles). Can the Times' current arguments be used against them using AI later?
- afavour 3y ago
  I don’t see how. If they own the content (which in the outlined scenario they would) they could do whatever they want with it. The argument is about unauthorized use of copyrighted materials, not just using AI in general.
- nkrisc 3y ago
  Used against them by whom? For what?
rvz 3y ago
This makes Apple more smarter to get a license from the NYT and other news organisations for permission to train on their news content for their AI, than to knowingly attempt to bypass that and scream 'fair use' after profiting off of training on and outputting verbatim paywalled articles without permission from the copyright holder. News organisations are probably waiting for the NYT to win the case and then similar claims and damages from others could follow; not just from the NYT. The key claim is this: > Vicarious copyright infringement (the idea that Microsoft and various OpenAI affiliates directed, controlled and profited from infringement committed by OpenAI OpCo LLC and OpenAI, LLC) OpenAI knew they needed a license to train their DALL-E AI model from shutterstock, instead of doing so with news organizations, they decided to trample all over it and profit off of copyrighted articles, without permission. The end result of this is a settlement and licensing deal, a similar likely result for Getty v. Stability.
gnarlouse 3y ago
I think the best result of this case is that the societal impact of AI is weighed fairly. Both in its potential for good and therefore the need to not overly stifle genuine progress, but also in its potential for replacing jobs for real people—with silicon owned by the hyper wealthy—and therefore the need to set the correct precedent for attribution of works and some form of like royalty. Most of the AI models of late are in someway trained on the collective works of mankind so it seems like, as to prevent the wealthy running off with the whole planet, legislation needs to be defined to make a portion of AI profit get returned to the common man who doesn’t have the aptitude or dumb luck to run a successful unicorn.
- graphe 3y ago
  This is a corporation fighting another corporation, it isn't going to give journalists more money no matter what happens with this case. The impact towards the citizen or worker hasn't even been weighted.
  - flappyeagle 3y ago
    Why do you assume this is the case? When a reporters story gets optioned for a movie they receive money, sometimes significant, from that
- ryanklee 3y ago
  > societal impact of AI is weighed fairly It's doubtful that the courts are going to accomplish anything so broad. And the media is unlikely to accomplish anything so nuanced.
  - gnarlouse 3y ago
    One landmark precedent opens the door to another and so on. We’re clearly not in a “fast takeoff” scenario, so mankind has time to strike a deal. We need to honestly weigh the dynamics of a world where climate change + societal collapse + advent of AI + power hierarchy = let’s just let billions eat shit while the ultra wealthy survive the apocalypse thanks to leverage we handed them without blinking or thinking.
vsnf 3y ago
Assuming this case is decided decisively in the NYT's favor, what would the effects be on the competitiveness of the US AI industry against other countries that aren't beholden to the ruling? Is the panacea really just as simple as licensing the data for training? Will the NYT et all even allow that? Surely one can't get licenses from each and every website they use data from, so the only way to compete would be to be more clever with less data, right?
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  OpenAI could just retrain with "clean" data...it would be a setback but not a death knell Big Tech could also retaliate by making NYTimes conveniently disappear from search/news indexing
  - votepaunchy 3y ago
    Or Big Tech could make a deal with Big Media: Apple Explores A.I. Deals With News Publishers. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-publishers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-...
  - flappyeagle 3y ago
    Bing I hardly knew ya
- stevenpetryk 3y ago
  I think it would lead to China surpassing the US in terms of AI tech pretty quickly. The US is actively trying to prevent that outcome already using sanctions on chip manufacturing equipment and IP.
- sbsjanabzuaa 3y ago
  You would do something like a Dmca takedown request form but with a industry standard fee, ala what Spotify pays to royalty holders per stream of a song that scales based on the value of the content. It gonna be like tiny tiny fractions. Ideally a marketplace would develop that can price each content fairly.
lettergram 3y ago
The outcome of this is probably going to be the same as similar cases — the end user (ie OpenAI in this case) must properly follow the law. It could be the media companies using AI that must evaluate the legality though. In any case, AI is a tool, not capable of reasoning. As such, the end user is responsible for ensure all applicable laws are followed. This is always the case. You wouldn’t sue Microsoft for copy & paste would we? It lets you copy people’s work. Imo the NYT case is pretty damn weak, because derived works are fair game. I can even read their article in full and provide comments on it, and it’s legal (provided the objective isn’t to share the copyrighted work)
booleandilemma 3y ago
Will Microsoft still be able to harvest people's code on GitHub if the Times wins? When will programmers speak out against their code being used for something they never consented to? I'm glad journalists are leading the charge against unfair AI, and I wish programmers were raising their voices also.
- 1f60c 3y ago
  Microsoft owns GitHub, so an explicit Copilot carve-out is but a TOS update away if they wanted to.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wolframhempel 3y ago
I think the fundamental question behind this and similar cases will be "how many degrees of derivation are required to go from copying to learning". If I read a lot of New York times and then go and write a political thriller, that's fine. If I read the New York times and then go and report the same news, but in my own voice, that's debatable. If I take the New York times article and publish it verbatim, that's a problem. All of these cases are ultimately on a spectrum - and the answer will go beyond AI I think. Tesla's lead designer previously worked at Mazda, GM and Volkswagen - so does Tesla owe these companies money because their designer learned car design there? This might sound silly, but it's a fair argument when it comes to AI - how much distance does there need to be between the learned from material and the output?
- tumult 3y ago
  You aren't software. The laws that apply to people reading and learning do not apply to software. Software isn't people. It can't be liable, it isn't taken to court. It can't go to jail, it can't marry, it can't raise a family. Saying that you can legally learn from something by reading it and producing something else, and therefore so should software, is a non sequitur.
  - throwaway4aday 3y ago
    I would not make that the foundation of my argument over the long term.
    - tumult 3y ago
      Assuming that software won't receive legal personhood seems like a pretty good foundation. If that's no longer the case, you have much crazier things to worry about than copyright infringement.
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    What makes humans special? Because they can marry and go to jail? That's not relevant, and what is relevant is the difference in outcome. If something takes in information, learns from it, and spits out information as a result of its learning, then why does the implementation matter at all? So what if it's software? That's the point. You're speaking as if it's a given that the issue comes down to software not being people, therefore society as a group should make software do whatever it wants even if it doesn't own that software. Not everyone is going to agree with that because it's not clear why, if something is wrong for software to do, it isn't also wrong for a human brain.
jl6 3y ago
From the OpenAI FAQ: “What sources of data are used for training OpenAI models? OpenAI uses data from different places including public sources, licensed third-party data, and information created by human reviewers.” Is the NY Times data in one of those categories?
- scoreandseven 3y ago
  The language says “including” which means these mentioned types of sources and potentially other sources that don’t sound as good written down so are left out.
throwaway4aday 3y ago
A model that possesses the entire collective knowledge of our civilization is useless if it can't directly quote its sources. If we enforce the behavior of always paraphrasing and synthesizing the information before returning it even in cases where the exact quote is asked for then that is a failure. The correct solution is to make the model capable of 1) quoting directly 2) identifying and then indicating when its output is a direct quote 3) citing the source of the identified quote while still retaining the ability to paraphrase and synthesize those sources when appropriate. These requirements are what humans are held to and should also be applied to commercial AI models. Models that are not intended for commercial use should be exempt and at this point there isn't really a way to hold them to such requirements anyways.
- preciz 3y ago
  > A model that possesses the entire collective knowledge of our civilization is useless if it can't directly quote its sources. That's a strong and baseless statement.
  - njgingrich 3y ago
    Well sure, it's easy to make a statement look bad if you only include half of it.
    - rpdillon 3y ago
      The statement is equally hyperbolic both as quoted and in the original context. LLMs often can't quote sources, and those models are nevertheless useful to lots of people. Makes it hard for me to take the rest of the comment seriously.
      - adastra22 3y ago
        A LLM that could quote sources would be even more useful, and in a world where both were available there’d be no reason to use the plagiarizing one.
smusamashah 3y ago
The examples shown in previous article on same case (ChatGPT producing exact text) makes it look like LLMs only need to see an example once. Or did it see those examples many times and therefore reproducing it?
pmarreck 3y ago
How is suing OpenAI different from suing an army of gifted individuals who can speed-read and who read most NYT articles and create responses based on them? Assuming there is no plagiarism, of course.
- microtonal 3y ago
  Because larger LLMs can reproduce text verbatim, speed readers probably not: https://nitter.net/maksym_andr/status/1740776900786626608 https://nitter.net/maksym_andr/status/1740776900786626608
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    So what this tells me is that if you make a carefully constructed prompt and change the temperature to zero (not an option normally available), and know the exact article title and perhaps the beginning of the first paragraph (which is pretty difficult to do unless you already basically have access to the full article), you can potentially get verbatim articles back out. Great, so all those paywalls that use verbatim subjects and early texts as a teaser are now broken! Well, for all old articles that the LLM was trained on, at least, I guess. Very simple countermeasure is to simply use AI to paraphrase the subject and article (paradoxically) until the person pays for the privilege of reading human-authored text. I'm sorry but this is a very weak argument. For example, I don't even believe normal users have access to the GPT4 system prompt unless they use the API directly (and possibly not even then, I'd have to check).
- eviks 3y ago
  One is real, another one is made up (and there is plagiarism, of course, many pages of examples of that)
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    The temperature setting controls randomness output of the LLM. We paraphrase all the time to avoid plagiarism and that's just somewhat randomized retelling of the same idea. If you set the temperature to 0 in an LLM it's basically in "decompress/rote mode". I don't think this is qualitatively the same as "copying", possibly more akin to "memorization". I haven't seen very many demonstrations of verbatim-copy output that wasn't done with a temperature of or near 0.
nzach 3y ago
Food for tought: What happens when we add a layer of indirection in the training? Imagine we have a model but don't train it with the copyrighted data. But we train if with every review ever made public about it. If we have a large number of reviews the model will be able to give pretty good responses about the topic and may even be able to reproduce some part of it. Is this copyright infringment? And what if we add another layer? Now we just train the model with the comments people leave about the reviews.
- votepaunchy 3y ago
  “ Imagine we have a model but don't train it with the copyrighted data. But we train if with every review ever made public about it.” Those reviews are also copyrighted works.
rifty 3y ago
The verbatim reproduction of their copyright is the interesting point. I can see where it would be free use to train on content but not to reproduce it. I feel like it is clearly a copyright issue if someone, through whatever means, posted New York Times articles on the internet for 1000s to potentially see and find through search. If someone through some other interface provides 1000s of people independently through private channels a New York Times article verbatim on ask isn’t this similar? In both cases it requires users to seek it out. In both cases copyright protected content is openly available to 1000s of people. Just because you generate your stock of copied material 1 by 1 on an order by order basis doesn’t feel materially different in effect on the copyright owner. The interface owners are willing to distribute copyright protected content 1000s of times on request for it.
pmarreck 3y ago
All this is going to do is make open source LLM's stronger in the long run. https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-leaderboard https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-leaderboar... Good luck suing a nonprofit open-source LLM for this. Also, the linked article uses the phrase "very strong case" while the subject here uses "strong case"; given that other lawsuits in this space have already been challenged (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sarah-silverman-lawsuit-ai-meta-1235669403/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sar...), isn't the "strength" of the case very subjective?
graphe 3y ago
> Here, Microsoft and OpenAI haven’t just used The Times’ content to teach the AI how to communicate, they’ve launched news-specific services and features that ingest both archived content and brand new articles from The Times. What news specific services are they talking about?
iandanforth 3y ago
I take issue with describing hallucinations as lies. They're most certainly not. There is no culpable agent with the ability to determine whether or not they are telling the truth. There is no intent, positive or negative, behind the generations. The generated statements may be inaccurate but they cannot be called lies. To do would be a dangerous level of anthropomorphization in the legal sphere.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  Lying and hallucinations would be accurate with the way people treated computers before “AI” ever existed. Intentional reckless disregard for truth is a form of lying. You don’t have to worry about the legal sphere anthropomorphising software. Software is legally not a person and therefore will not be treated as one by the courts, regardless of how people commonly refer to it.
  - tensor 3y ago
    If AI were treated like software these court cases would be very clear and not an issue. The answer would be that yes AI can copy content as part of its operation but if a human uses it to reproduce that content exactly for others then it violates copyright law. We've long had precedent with search engines. But despite that, these cases are revisiting the way copyright might work. These cases are not as simple as people like you imply no matter how many times you repeat the utterly pointless and irrelevant fact that computers are not humans.
  - iandanforth 3y ago
    > "You don’t have to worry about the legal sphere anthropomorphising software." This is a lawyer writing about a lawsuit on a law office blog. That's what's worrisome.
- 3y ago
endisneigh 3y ago
What’s most frustrating to me is the ridiculous false equivalency people make between computers and humans “Babies learn from their environment why not GPT?” “Human teachers remix stuff for their lessons all the time, why can’t GPT?” Computers are not humans. Computers are not humans. Computers are not humans. Good grief.
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  OpenAI is a corporation, which means it's a person under US law. So yes, it's relevant as to whether a person can remix copyrighted material or learn from copyrighted material, because the same laws that apply to people apply to corporations. Moreover, the AI the product of the collective action of _people_, it wasn't formed out of nothing.
  - probably_wrong 3y ago
    > OpenAI is a corporation, which means it's a person under US law. No, corporations are not people. They have some of the rights a person has, but not all. For example, from [1], "it is firmly established that a corporation has no fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination". [1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/515/295/292973/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/515...
    - empath-nirvana 3y ago
      Corporate rights are basically limited to the rights that any collective group of people would have, so self-incrimination doesn't make sense, but it doesn't get around the broader point that the same corporate personhood that allows corporations to be sued for copyright infringement, allows them to use the same defenses that groups of individuals (ie, co-authors) could use for copyright infringement. Could you sue "Alice and Bob" for copyright infringement because they watched a lot of movies before writing their screenplay? Nobody writes a screenplay from first principles. They're all based on all the other movies they've seen to some extent.
  - zilti 3y ago
Xenoamorphous 3y ago
The irony here is that there’s 99% chance that the NYT is using ChatGPT internally. Even their journalists, unbeknownst to their bosses.
- smt88 3y ago
  There's nothing ironic about that. NYT likely wouldn't be suing if ChatGPT weren't useful. They acknowledge its usefulness and are demanding to be compensated for the billions of dollars they spent producing articles that trained ChatGPT.
anonymouse008 3y ago
The legal question should be around: Does open AI make any guarantees about the content and their validity? Is the output considered property of OpenAI? You can’t train on it, so does that mean it’s their property? This is the most important question. For example, if you were to hire a group of writers, ghost writers to be specific, to re-create someone else’s work, then publish it yourself as your own who is at fault? Who gets sued? Is it you who directed the writers to do the work or is it the writers who did the work? So if we accept this model, the owner/onus is on the prompter to not re-create copyrighted works. (Albeit an assumption that the writers are unaware to some extent)
eastern 3y ago
It's amusing that NYT spends so much verbiage in the complaint speaking so highly of itself as doing some great service to humanity and then stating a legal argument that is equally applicable to a trash-rag dishing out celebrity gossip.
talkingtab 3y ago
The question is: if the NYT can seek relief from Microsoft and OpenAI for this, then why can't every person who has code on Github do the same. In this country we are at an unfortunate place where only the corporations and rich people can seek relief. You need a lawyer. However, any person has the right to file appear "pro se". And if the legal filings and arguments by NYT are public, then why can't I just file my own case. And you. And you. And you. And you. And you. You get the picture. We have this situation where corporations can exploit situations and people with impunity. They can buy off the government - oh wait, we have to call that "lobbying". Lawyers won't take on the case unless it is a class action worth billions to them. In which case you and I get a piddling amount or none. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38901484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38901484. (the question being whether Apple settled in order to avoid a finding that their action was purposeful). All we need is to use the information from the NYT legal case. <humor?> And hey maybe someone can use OpenAI to generate the filings?</end questionable humor>
maroonblazer 3y ago
Has anyone successfully repro'd the plaintiff's claims of unlawful use? I just made several attempts using GPT-4 and was unsuccessful. Perhaps OAI have already taken action to disable ChatGPT's ability to quote in full without attribution, if it was ever possible in the first place(?) Plaintiff doesn't disclose exactly which prompts they used to give rise to their infringement claims, which seems suspect. If the case goes to trial, and OAI has taken steps to mitigate the harm - i.e., it no longer reproduces NYT content word-for-word - does that significantly reduce the damages they could seek?
- mmiyer 3y ago
  I think you need to use the API to reproduce. I heard the chat prompt stops gpt4 from some of this behavior.
lsy 3y ago
One allegation that stands out is > DMCA Section 1202 violations by all defendants regarding removal of copyright management information from items in the datasets Aside from the obvious fact that OpenAI doesn't want "© 2023 The New York Times" appearing anywhere in their output, I'm sure it's also removed because LLMs don't adapt well to metadata and can't reliably correlate metadata to the exact text it's attached to, treating it instead as input text itself. One imagines a first round of training where this metadata was retained and every response from the LLM came back with a perfunctory hallucinated copyright from another publisher.
Geisterde 3y ago
Seems like people are very concerned with accuracy and atribution. Personally I want AI to make the internet a warm sludge of meaningless binary, I want you to have no idea whether the person on the other side of the keyboard is real or not, I want you to be wary that everything you read is an AI hallucination. Be skeptical.
simonw 3y ago
If you're interested in this case, I very strongly recommend actually reading the 69 page PDF. It's surprisingly readable. https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20... The first 4 pages lay out the high level complaint very clearly, but if found most of the rest of the document (skip the bit about jurisdictions) was clearly written and easy for my non-lawyer brain to understand too.
jovial_cavalier 3y ago
When did everyone in these circles flip flop from thinking that copyright is fake and that anyone who tries to enforce it should not be taken seriously, to thinking that it's a serious issue and has to be addressed? I'm quite bearish on AI in general, but the whole copyright argument is nonsense to me. How is it any different than a human learning from public material in their field? My understanding is that you are not distributing copyrighted material verbatim, but a set of weights that were trained on copyrighted material. Just like how a writer reads a lot of other writers and becomes a better writer. If we applied this same standard to human authors, couldn't we say that every narrative is actually the intellectual property of some unnamed hunter-gatherer who described how he killed an antelope to a captive audience?
- krapp 3y ago
  I feel like we need to put a banner up that says "We don't apply the same standards to AI that we do to people because AIs are software, not people." And we can just point to it instead of wasting time mentioning what should be obvious, instead of entertaining these constant reductio ad absurdum arguments based on false equivalence.
  - jovial_cavalier 3y ago
    I don't really think it's reductio ad absurdum. If something is okay for me to do, then I can make software to automate it. It's okay for me to take existing artwork and use it as reference to make the artwork I want to make. I can make software to help me do that, like photoshop. But I can't make an AI tool to help me do that. Why? What is the actual difference?
RockyMcNuts 3y ago
In music, there is a 'compulsory license', you can't prevent someone from playing your music but you do have to get paid for it. AI will need something like that, we are going to have to reinvent IP law. And big tech will write those laws since that's how our democracy currently works. Will be a big fight between Microsoft and Disney with maybe tiny input from actual creators.
ur-whale 3y ago
> The New York Times Launches a Strong Case Against Microsoft and OpenAI aka "Ancient mammoth sinking in tar pit throws one last fit before facing full-on extinction".
ankit219 3y ago
Not a lawyer, but seems like the law on copyright and fair use is not that clear cut. It comes down to arguments and how well they resonate. The lawsuit here argues all possible sides - producing content verbatim, summarizing an article (wirecutter), and then also hallucinations about the stories and brand names. All three are done by journalists themselves anyway, so a favorable verdict opens them up to a lawsuit? Anyway, we tend to forget that there are countries outside USA who can make laws too. And they will do. What if, one country happily says training content for LLMs is not copyright violation (like Japan was rumored to do)? That is an answer I am more interested in finding out. Any country that passes that law would see massive investment (esp if other countries deem it a violation). That would just mean tech + investments + innovation going out of USA. A recent trend here is approach of France towards regulating AI in common EU laws[1]. [1]https://www.politico.eu/article/thierry-breton-mistral-battle-france-ai-soul-tech-regulation/ https://www.politico.eu/article/thierry-breton-mistral-battl...
cxr 3y ago
Related: NYT sues OpenAI, Microsoft over 'millions of articles' used to train ChatGPT. 2023 December 27. <https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/27/the_new_york_times_files/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/27/the_new_york_times_fi...> Discussion on HN (86 comments; original submission title: 'A business model based on mass copyright infringement'): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38784194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38784194>

205 points by andy99 3y ago

Without going into the merits, maybe the best thing about this is that the NYT has the money and stature to hire good lawyers and fight this all the way to the Supreme Court. It'll benefit everyone if the fair use question is decided definitively sooner than later. I could see OpenAI settling, but it's in NYT's interest not to since it's not just OpenAI, they're just the most egregious ("we can use your copyrighted works for our model but you can't use our uncopyrightable output for your model").

solomatov 3y ago
It's not a fair use question, it's a question about models reproducing the article text almost verbatim. (IANAL)
- brigadier132 3y ago
  If it's fair use reproducing the article text verbatim is fine.
  - andy99 3y ago
    What is "it"? Training can be fair use, i.e. updating weights incrementally based on predicted next token probabilities. And I (not a lawyer) think that if a broadly trained foundation model can recall some verbatim text, that doesn't mean the model is infringing. It seems like the lawsuit here is talking about specific NYT related functionality, like retrieving the text in new articles. That essentially has nothing to do with training and running a foundation LLM, it's about some specific shenanigans with NYT content, and it's legal status would appear to have nothing to do with whether training is fair use.
    - gremlinunderway 3y ago
      Good luck trying to explain "updating weights incrementally based on predicted next token probabilities" to completely non-technical lawyers and judges.
      - lesuorac 3y ago
        Good thing they don't have to. As I've said before, this slight of hand to talk about the case as-if its about training is a great move by OpenAi; however the case is more than just about training. NYT is alleging that OpenAI maintains a database of NYT works and refers to it verbatim (per-prompt) as part of the ChatGPT software and not via some pre-trained wieghts. This is akin to having to explain to non-technical lawyers and judges how crypto works. In the FTX case it became irrelevant because you can just nail them on fraud for using deposited funds for non-allowed reasons.
        simonw 3y ago
        I didn't see NYT allege that - their lawsuit explains pre-training pretty accurately I thought.
        lesuorac 3y ago
        Its buried on page 37 - #108. There probably are other examples in the lawsuit but this is sufficent. > Synthetic search applications built on the GPT LLMs, including Bing Chat and Browse with Bing for ChatGPT, display extensive excerpts or paraphrases of the contents of search results, including Times content, that may not have been included in the model’s training set. The “grounding” technique employed by these products includes receiving a prompt from a user, copying Times content relating to the prompt from the internet, providing the prompt together with the copied Times content as additional context for the LLM, and having the LLM stitch together paraphrases or quotes from the copied Times content to create natural-language substitutes that serve the same informative purpose as the original. In some cases, Defendants’ models simply spit out several paragraphs of The Times’s articles. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68117049/1/the-new-york-times-company-v-microsoft-corporation/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68117049/1/the-new-york...
  - solomatov 3y ago
    Yep, you seem to be right. Google stores the quotes from pages, and it's fair use. Again, I am not a lawyer, and didn't think about this.
  - simonw 3y ago
    This is argued extensively in the lawsuit document. A key argument the NYT is making is that part of the definition of fair use is not producing a product that competes with the original. They argue that ChatGPT et al DO compete with the original, in a way that harms the NYT business model. One example they give: ChatGPT can reproduce recommendations made by the Wirecutter, without including the affiliate links that form the Wirecutter's main source of revenue - page 48 of https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...
    - shkkmo 3y ago
      There are plenty of other services that strip affiliate links from content for users, such as ad blockers. Notably, in both those cases, the user is specifically asking for what wirecutter thinks. To me, that makes the infringing behavior clearly the fault of the user of the tool, not the tool itself. When I saw this lawsuit announced, I assumed that large portions content were being reproduced in response to generic queries. That isn't the case, every example I've seen from this lawsuit has prompts where the user specifically asks for the content. To me, any fault and liability rests on the user here.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  Fair use is a key defense for OpenAI. The article also mentions the idea that the model is merely extracting (uncopyrightable) facts, which is interesting, but might be a tough one to prove since LLMs have no way of establishing what are facts, and don't return facts by design.
6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
I have less optimism. The article says NYT was trying to negotiate with microsoft and openai for licensing, so they may be inclined to settle ("just give us a zillion bucks a year and we're cool"). And if they don't settle, then questions like this often seem to be decided by technicalities that don't really matter to all the similar observers hoping for a broader ruling.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  That isn't a great deal for OpenAI, since everyone will be at their door asking for licence fees in that case. In this case it's all about the technicalities.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

fallingknife 3y ago

> Here, Microsoft and OpenAI haven’t just used The Times’ content to teach the AI how to communicate, they’ve launched news-specific services and features that ingest both archived content and brand new articles from The Times. What is this referring to? AFAIK reporting on real time news is beyond the capability of an LLM, and a Google search doesn't turn up any news reporting feature. > But the hallucinations aren’t facts; they’re lies. And even if the defendants prevail in arguing that the AIs are mostly just providing people with unprotectable facts, there’s very little to shield them from liability for the lies, both with respect to trademark dilution claims, but also with respect to potential libel or privacy-related claims that might be brought by other individuals. This seems really weak because libel requires damages. It would be incredibly hard for the NYT to prove any damages from ChatGPT lying about it. Also libel requires "actual malice" which means the libeler needs to know that their statements are false. Good luck showing that with an LLM.

vulcan01 3y ago
> libel requires "actual malice" which means the libeler needs to know that their statements are false Creators of LLMs (OpenAI in this case) should know that their LLMs regularly provide false statements.
- danielrhodes 3y ago
  Telling a lie is not illegal by itself. Telling a lie with the intent of harming someone, especially their reputation, is another story.
- diggan 3y ago
  One could argue that the LLM are not making any statements at all, as that would require intent and purpose beyond what they can (currently) do. The LLM outputs the most likely token to appear next, based on what it learned during training. This could be anything, and it happens to generate some text that sometimes looks like statements, but is just text generated by lots of math. Of course I'm not actually arguing this, and have no horses in this race. But not hard to imagine that someone could make this argument and also believe it.

gumballindie 3y ago

Great progress. It would be great if open source developers would group up and sue them into oblivion.

sam_goody 3y ago

Let's imagine that they settle out of court. And then in a few years, as AI improves, the NYT relies on AI to write some of their articles (or they rely on AI to proofread and edit their articles). Can the Times' current arguments be used against them using AI later?

afavour 3y ago
I don’t see how. If they own the content (which in the outlined scenario they would) they could do whatever they want with it. The argument is about unauthorized use of copyrighted materials, not just using AI in general.
nkrisc 3y ago
Used against them by whom? For what?

rvz 3y ago

This makes Apple more smarter to get a license from the NYT and other news organisations for permission to train on their news content for their AI, than to knowingly attempt to bypass that and scream 'fair use' after profiting off of training on and outputting verbatim paywalled articles without permission from the copyright holder. News organisations are probably waiting for the NYT to win the case and then similar claims and damages from others could follow; not just from the NYT. The key claim is this: > Vicarious copyright infringement (the idea that Microsoft and various OpenAI affiliates directed, controlled and profited from infringement committed by OpenAI OpCo LLC and OpenAI, LLC) OpenAI knew they needed a license to train their DALL-E AI model from shutterstock, instead of doing so with news organizations, they decided to trample all over it and profit off of copyrighted articles, without permission. The end result of this is a settlement and licensing deal, a similar likely result for Getty v. Stability.

gnarlouse 3y ago

I think the best result of this case is that the societal impact of AI is weighed fairly. Both in its potential for good and therefore the need to not overly stifle genuine progress, but also in its potential for replacing jobs for real people—with silicon owned by the hyper wealthy—and therefore the need to set the correct precedent for attribution of works and some form of like royalty. Most of the AI models of late are in someway trained on the collective works of mankind so it seems like, as to prevent the wealthy running off with the whole planet, legislation needs to be defined to make a portion of AI profit get returned to the common man who doesn’t have the aptitude or dumb luck to run a successful unicorn.

graphe 3y ago
This is a corporation fighting another corporation, it isn't going to give journalists more money no matter what happens with this case. The impact towards the citizen or worker hasn't even been weighted.
- flappyeagle 3y ago
  Why do you assume this is the case? When a reporters story gets optioned for a movie they receive money, sometimes significant, from that
ryanklee 3y ago
> societal impact of AI is weighed fairly It's doubtful that the courts are going to accomplish anything so broad. And the media is unlikely to accomplish anything so nuanced.
- gnarlouse 3y ago
  One landmark precedent opens the door to another and so on. We’re clearly not in a “fast takeoff” scenario, so mankind has time to strike a deal. We need to honestly weigh the dynamics of a world where climate change + societal collapse + advent of AI + power hierarchy = let’s just let billions eat shit while the ultra wealthy survive the apocalypse thanks to leverage we handed them without blinking or thinking.

vsnf 3y ago

Assuming this case is decided decisively in the NYT's favor, what would the effects be on the competitiveness of the US AI industry against other countries that aren't beholden to the ruling? Is the panacea really just as simple as licensing the data for training? Will the NYT et all even allow that? Surely one can't get licenses from each and every website they use data from, so the only way to compete would be to be more clever with less data, right?

oldpersonintx 3y ago
OpenAI could just retrain with "clean" data...it would be a setback but not a death knell Big Tech could also retaliate by making NYTimes conveniently disappear from search/news indexing
- votepaunchy 3y ago
  Or Big Tech could make a deal with Big Media: Apple Explores A.I. Deals With News Publishers. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-publishers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-...
- flappyeagle 3y ago
  Bing I hardly knew ya
stevenpetryk 3y ago
I think it would lead to China surpassing the US in terms of AI tech pretty quickly. The US is actively trying to prevent that outcome already using sanctions on chip manufacturing equipment and IP.
sbsjanabzuaa 3y ago
You would do something like a Dmca takedown request form but with a industry standard fee, ala what Spotify pays to royalty holders per stream of a song that scales based on the value of the content. It gonna be like tiny tiny fractions. Ideally a marketplace would develop that can price each content fairly.

lettergram 3y ago

The outcome of this is probably going to be the same as similar cases — the end user (ie OpenAI in this case) must properly follow the law. It could be the media companies using AI that must evaluate the legality though. In any case, AI is a tool, not capable of reasoning. As such, the end user is responsible for ensure all applicable laws are followed. This is always the case. You wouldn’t sue Microsoft for copy & paste would we? It lets you copy people’s work. Imo the NYT case is pretty damn weak, because derived works are fair game. I can even read their article in full and provide comments on it, and it’s legal (provided the objective isn’t to share the copyrighted work)

booleandilemma 3y ago

Will Microsoft still be able to harvest people's code on GitHub if the Times wins? When will programmers speak out against their code being used for something they never consented to? I'm glad journalists are leading the charge against unfair AI, and I wish programmers were raising their voices also.

1f60c 3y ago
Microsoft owns GitHub, so an explicit Copilot carve-out is but a TOS update away if they wanted to.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wolframhempel 3y ago

I think the fundamental question behind this and similar cases will be "how many degrees of derivation are required to go from copying to learning". If I read a lot of New York times and then go and write a political thriller, that's fine. If I read the New York times and then go and report the same news, but in my own voice, that's debatable. If I take the New York times article and publish it verbatim, that's a problem. All of these cases are ultimately on a spectrum - and the answer will go beyond AI I think. Tesla's lead designer previously worked at Mazda, GM and Volkswagen - so does Tesla owe these companies money because their designer learned car design there? This might sound silly, but it's a fair argument when it comes to AI - how much distance does there need to be between the learned from material and the output?

tumult 3y ago
You aren't software. The laws that apply to people reading and learning do not apply to software. Software isn't people. It can't be liable, it isn't taken to court. It can't go to jail, it can't marry, it can't raise a family. Saying that you can legally learn from something by reading it and producing something else, and therefore so should software, is a non sequitur.
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  I would not make that the foundation of my argument over the long term.
  - tumult 3y ago
    Assuming that software won't receive legal personhood seems like a pretty good foundation. If that's no longer the case, you have much crazier things to worry about than copyright infringement.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  What makes humans special? Because they can marry and go to jail? That's not relevant, and what is relevant is the difference in outcome. If something takes in information, learns from it, and spits out information as a result of its learning, then why does the implementation matter at all? So what if it's software? That's the point. You're speaking as if it's a given that the issue comes down to software not being people, therefore society as a group should make software do whatever it wants even if it doesn't own that software. Not everyone is going to agree with that because it's not clear why, if something is wrong for software to do, it isn't also wrong for a human brain.

jl6 3y ago

From the OpenAI FAQ: “What sources of data are used for training OpenAI models? OpenAI uses data from different places including public sources, licensed third-party data, and information created by human reviewers.” Is the NY Times data in one of those categories?

scoreandseven 3y ago
The language says “including” which means these mentioned types of sources and potentially other sources that don’t sound as good written down so are left out.

throwaway4aday 3y ago

A model that possesses the entire collective knowledge of our civilization is useless if it can't directly quote its sources. If we enforce the behavior of always paraphrasing and synthesizing the information before returning it even in cases where the exact quote is asked for then that is a failure. The correct solution is to make the model capable of 1) quoting directly 2) identifying and then indicating when its output is a direct quote 3) citing the source of the identified quote while still retaining the ability to paraphrase and synthesize those sources when appropriate. These requirements are what humans are held to and should also be applied to commercial AI models. Models that are not intended for commercial use should be exempt and at this point there isn't really a way to hold them to such requirements anyways.

preciz 3y ago
> A model that possesses the entire collective knowledge of our civilization is useless if it can't directly quote its sources. That's a strong and baseless statement.
- njgingrich 3y ago
  Well sure, it's easy to make a statement look bad if you only include half of it.
  - rpdillon 3y ago
    The statement is equally hyperbolic both as quoted and in the original context. LLMs often can't quote sources, and those models are nevertheless useful to lots of people. Makes it hard for me to take the rest of the comment seriously.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      A LLM that could quote sources would be even more useful, and in a world where both were available there’d be no reason to use the plagiarizing one.

smusamashah 3y ago

The examples shown in previous article on same case (ChatGPT producing exact text) makes it look like LLMs only need to see an example once. Or did it see those examples many times and therefore reproducing it?

pmarreck 3y ago

How is suing OpenAI different from suing an army of gifted individuals who can speed-read and who read most NYT articles and create responses based on them? Assuming there is no plagiarism, of course.

microtonal 3y ago
Because larger LLMs can reproduce text verbatim, speed readers probably not: https://nitter.net/maksym_andr/status/1740776900786626608 https://nitter.net/maksym_andr/status/1740776900786626608
- pmarreck 3y ago
  So what this tells me is that if you make a carefully constructed prompt and change the temperature to zero (not an option normally available), and know the exact article title and perhaps the beginning of the first paragraph (which is pretty difficult to do unless you already basically have access to the full article), you can potentially get verbatim articles back out. Great, so all those paywalls that use verbatim subjects and early texts as a teaser are now broken! Well, for all old articles that the LLM was trained on, at least, I guess. Very simple countermeasure is to simply use AI to paraphrase the subject and article (paradoxically) until the person pays for the privilege of reading human-authored text. I'm sorry but this is a very weak argument. For example, I don't even believe normal users have access to the GPT4 system prompt unless they use the API directly (and possibly not even then, I'd have to check).
eviks 3y ago
One is real, another one is made up (and there is plagiarism, of course, many pages of examples of that)
- pmarreck 3y ago
  The temperature setting controls randomness output of the LLM. We paraphrase all the time to avoid plagiarism and that's just somewhat randomized retelling of the same idea. If you set the temperature to 0 in an LLM it's basically in "decompress/rote mode". I don't think this is qualitatively the same as "copying", possibly more akin to "memorization". I haven't seen very many demonstrations of verbatim-copy output that wasn't done with a temperature of or near 0.

nzach 3y ago

Food for tought: What happens when we add a layer of indirection in the training? Imagine we have a model but don't train it with the copyrighted data. But we train if with every review ever made public about it. If we have a large number of reviews the model will be able to give pretty good responses about the topic and may even be able to reproduce some part of it. Is this copyright infringment? And what if we add another layer? Now we just train the model with the comments people leave about the reviews.

votepaunchy 3y ago
“ Imagine we have a model but don't train it with the copyrighted data. But we train if with every review ever made public about it.” Those reviews are also copyrighted works.

rifty 3y ago

The verbatim reproduction of their copyright is the interesting point. I can see where it would be free use to train on content but not to reproduce it. I feel like it is clearly a copyright issue if someone, through whatever means, posted New York Times articles on the internet for 1000s to potentially see and find through search. If someone through some other interface provides 1000s of people independently through private channels a New York Times article verbatim on ask isn’t this similar? In both cases it requires users to seek it out. In both cases copyright protected content is openly available to 1000s of people. Just because you generate your stock of copied material 1 by 1 on an order by order basis doesn’t feel materially different in effect on the copyright owner. The interface owners are willing to distribute copyright protected content 1000s of times on request for it.

pmarreck 3y ago

All this is going to do is make open source LLM's stronger in the long run. https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-leaderboard https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-leaderboar... Good luck suing a nonprofit open-source LLM for this. Also, the linked article uses the phrase "very strong case" while the subject here uses "strong case"; given that other lawsuits in this space have already been challenged (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sarah-silverman-lawsuit-ai-meta-1235669403/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sar...), isn't the "strength" of the case very subjective?

graphe 3y ago

iandanforth 3y ago

I take issue with describing hallucinations as lies. They're most certainly not. There is no culpable agent with the ability to determine whether or not they are telling the truth. There is no intent, positive or negative, behind the generations. The generated statements may be inaccurate but they cannot be called lies. To do would be a dangerous level of anthropomorphization in the legal sphere.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kayodelycaon 3y ago
Lying and hallucinations would be accurate with the way people treated computers before “AI” ever existed. Intentional reckless disregard for truth is a form of lying. You don’t have to worry about the legal sphere anthropomorphising software. Software is legally not a person and therefore will not be treated as one by the courts, regardless of how people commonly refer to it.
- tensor 3y ago
  If AI were treated like software these court cases would be very clear and not an issue. The answer would be that yes AI can copy content as part of its operation but if a human uses it to reproduce that content exactly for others then it violates copyright law. We've long had precedent with search engines. But despite that, these cases are revisiting the way copyright might work. These cases are not as simple as people like you imply no matter how many times you repeat the utterly pointless and irrelevant fact that computers are not humans.
- iandanforth 3y ago
  > "You don’t have to worry about the legal sphere anthropomorphising software." This is a lawyer writing about a lawsuit on a law office blog. That's what's worrisome.
3y ago

endisneigh 3y ago

What’s most frustrating to me is the ridiculous false equivalency people make between computers and humans “Babies learn from their environment why not GPT?” “Human teachers remix stuff for their lessons all the time, why can’t GPT?” Computers are not humans. Computers are not humans. Computers are not humans. Good grief.

empath-nirvana 3y ago
OpenAI is a corporation, which means it's a person under US law. So yes, it's relevant as to whether a person can remix copyrighted material or learn from copyrighted material, because the same laws that apply to people apply to corporations. Moreover, the AI the product of the collective action of _people_, it wasn't formed out of nothing.
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  > OpenAI is a corporation, which means it's a person under US law. No, corporations are not people. They have some of the rights a person has, but not all. For example, from [1], "it is firmly established that a corporation has no fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination". [1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/515/295/292973/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/515...
  - empath-nirvana 3y ago
    Corporate rights are basically limited to the rights that any collective group of people would have, so self-incrimination doesn't make sense, but it doesn't get around the broader point that the same corporate personhood that allows corporations to be sued for copyright infringement, allows them to use the same defenses that groups of individuals (ie, co-authors) could use for copyright infringement. Could you sue "Alice and Bob" for copyright infringement because they watched a lot of movies before writing their screenplay? Nobody writes a screenplay from first principles. They're all based on all the other movies they've seen to some extent.
- zilti 3y ago

Xenoamorphous 3y ago

The irony here is that there’s 99% chance that the NYT is using ChatGPT internally. Even their journalists, unbeknownst to their bosses.

smt88 3y ago
There's nothing ironic about that. NYT likely wouldn't be suing if ChatGPT weren't useful. They acknowledge its usefulness and are demanding to be compensated for the billions of dollars they spent producing articles that trained ChatGPT.

anonymouse008 3y ago

The legal question should be around: Does open AI make any guarantees about the content and their validity? Is the output considered property of OpenAI? You can’t train on it, so does that mean it’s their property? This is the most important question. For example, if you were to hire a group of writers, ghost writers to be specific, to re-create someone else’s work, then publish it yourself as your own who is at fault? Who gets sued? Is it you who directed the writers to do the work or is it the writers who did the work? So if we accept this model, the owner/onus is on the prompter to not re-create copyrighted works. (Albeit an assumption that the writers are unaware to some extent)

eastern 3y ago

It's amusing that NYT spends so much verbiage in the complaint speaking so highly of itself as doing some great service to humanity and then stating a legal argument that is equally applicable to a trash-rag dishing out celebrity gossip.

talkingtab 3y ago

The question is: if the NYT can seek relief from Microsoft and OpenAI for this, then why can't every person who has code on Github do the same. In this country we are at an unfortunate place where only the corporations and rich people can seek relief. You need a lawyer. However, any person has the right to file appear "pro se". And if the legal filings and arguments by NYT are public, then why can't I just file my own case. And you. And you. And you. And you. And you. You get the picture. We have this situation where corporations can exploit situations and people with impunity. They can buy off the government - oh wait, we have to call that "lobbying". Lawyers won't take on the case unless it is a class action worth billions to them. In which case you and I get a piddling amount or none. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38901484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38901484. (the question being whether Apple settled in order to avoid a finding that their action was purposeful). All we need is to use the information from the NYT legal case. <humor?> And hey maybe someone can use OpenAI to generate the filings?</end questionable humor>

maroonblazer 3y ago

Has anyone successfully repro'd the plaintiff's claims of unlawful use? I just made several attempts using GPT-4 and was unsuccessful. Perhaps OAI have already taken action to disable ChatGPT's ability to quote in full without attribution, if it was ever possible in the first place(?) Plaintiff doesn't disclose exactly which prompts they used to give rise to their infringement claims, which seems suspect. If the case goes to trial, and OAI has taken steps to mitigate the harm - i.e., it no longer reproduces NYT content word-for-word - does that significantly reduce the damages they could seek?

mmiyer 3y ago
I think you need to use the API to reproduce. I heard the chat prompt stops gpt4 from some of this behavior.

lsy 3y ago

One allegation that stands out is > DMCA Section 1202 violations by all defendants regarding removal of copyright management information from items in the datasets Aside from the obvious fact that OpenAI doesn't want "© 2023 The New York Times" appearing anywhere in their output, I'm sure it's also removed because LLMs don't adapt well to metadata and can't reliably correlate metadata to the exact text it's attached to, treating it instead as input text itself. One imagines a first round of training where this metadata was retained and every response from the LLM came back with a perfunctory hallucinated copyright from another publisher.

Geisterde 3y ago

Seems like people are very concerned with accuracy and atribution. Personally I want AI to make the internet a warm sludge of meaningless binary, I want you to have no idea whether the person on the other side of the keyboard is real or not, I want you to be wary that everything you read is an AI hallucination. Be skeptical.

simonw 3y ago

If you're interested in this case, I very strongly recommend actually reading the 69 page PDF. It's surprisingly readable. https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20... The first 4 pages lay out the high level complaint very clearly, but if found most of the rest of the document (skip the bit about jurisdictions) was clearly written and easy for my non-lawyer brain to understand too.

jovial_cavalier 3y ago

When did everyone in these circles flip flop from thinking that copyright is fake and that anyone who tries to enforce it should not be taken seriously, to thinking that it's a serious issue and has to be addressed? I'm quite bearish on AI in general, but the whole copyright argument is nonsense to me. How is it any different than a human learning from public material in their field? My understanding is that you are not distributing copyrighted material verbatim, but a set of weights that were trained on copyrighted material. Just like how a writer reads a lot of other writers and becomes a better writer. If we applied this same standard to human authors, couldn't we say that every narrative is actually the intellectual property of some unnamed hunter-gatherer who described how he killed an antelope to a captive audience?

krapp 3y ago
I feel like we need to put a banner up that says "We don't apply the same standards to AI that we do to people because AIs are software, not people." And we can just point to it instead of wasting time mentioning what should be obvious, instead of entertaining these constant reductio ad absurdum arguments based on false equivalence.
- jovial_cavalier 3y ago
  I don't really think it's reductio ad absurdum. If something is okay for me to do, then I can make software to automate it. It's okay for me to take existing artwork and use it as reference to make the artwork I want to make. I can make software to help me do that, like photoshop. But I can't make an AI tool to help me do that. Why? What is the actual difference?

RockyMcNuts 3y ago

In music, there is a 'compulsory license', you can't prevent someone from playing your music but you do have to get paid for it. AI will need something like that, we are going to have to reinvent IP law. And big tech will write those laws since that's how our democracy currently works. Will be a big fight between Microsoft and Disney with maybe tiny input from actual creators.

ur-whale 3y ago

> The New York Times Launches a Strong Case Against Microsoft and OpenAI aka "Ancient mammoth sinking in tar pit throws one last fit before facing full-on extinction".

ankit219 3y ago

Not a lawyer, but seems like the law on copyright and fair use is not that clear cut. It comes down to arguments and how well they resonate. The lawsuit here argues all possible sides - producing content verbatim, summarizing an article (wirecutter), and then also hallucinations about the stories and brand names. All three are done by journalists themselves anyway, so a favorable verdict opens them up to a lawsuit? Anyway, we tend to forget that there are countries outside USA who can make laws too. And they will do. What if, one country happily says training content for LLMs is not copyright violation (like Japan was rumored to do)? That is an answer I am more interested in finding out. Any country that passes that law would see massive investment (esp if other countries deem it a violation). That would just mean tech + investments + innovation going out of USA. A recent trend here is approach of France towards regulating AI in common EU laws[1]. [1]https://www.politico.eu/article/thierry-breton-mistral-battle-france-ai-soul-tech-regulation/ https://www.politico.eu/article/thierry-breton-mistral-battl...

cxr 3y ago

Related: NYT sues OpenAI, Microsoft over 'millions of articles' used to train ChatGPT. 2023 December 27. <https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/27/the_new_york_times_files/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/27/the_new_york_times_fi...> Discussion on HN (86 comments; original submission title: 'A business model based on mass copyright infringement'): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38784194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38784194>