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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

• 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.
  • cj 3y ago
    That would require the model to have the ability to attribute what training data sources it’s using to respond to a specific prompt, which AFAIK isn’t really compatible with how LLMs work.
• cj 3y ago
  > what would the effects be on the competitiveness of the US AI industry To me, this leads to another question: is it possible to get a GPT-4 quality model using only training data from major content providers? In other words, what if OpenAI didn’t crawl the entire internet and only used data from Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, GitHub, NYT, Stackoverflow, and [list 100 more well known high quality data sources here] If it’s possible to get to GPT-4 model quality with training data from a couple hundred centralized sources, then maybe it won’t have any impact at all (other than OpenAI needing to pay other companies to use their data for training data) Or, if the long tail “every website on the internet” really is the secret to training LLM models, then that would be much more problematic.
  • microtonal 3y ago
    Even then, e.g. citizens in the EU have the right to be forgotten. So if they use user-submitted data (and in some cases e.g. newspaper articles about specific people), users can request the data to be removed, which will be... an interesting challenge?
  • petesergeant 3y ago
    It’s possible to get a good image model this way: https://www.gettyimages.ae/ai/generation/about https://www.gettyimages.ae/ai/generation/about
  • throwaway4aday 3y ago
    There are quite a few papers that indicate that the important factor is the quality of the data, regardless of where it is sourced from. You still need a lot of it so throwing out large chunks of your training set does work against you whether you're doing that for legal reasons or quality reasons. The solution appears to be synthetic, high quality data generated by another model but that makes it a bit of a chicken and egg problem where you need a high quality model like GPT-4 to produce high quality data reliably. I think there are methods for getting around this using less capable models by producing a lot more examples and then using another model to judge the quality of each example and only selecting the best ones. I also suspect you could get pretty far by permuting a smaller set of high quality data to produce a lot more examples that have the same meaning but differ in how they are written.
• blueboo 3y ago
  80/20 rule surely applies. Licensing the most prominent IP holders will get the vast majority of data secured. These billion-dollar-funded efforts can comfortably chase down, say, hundreds of deals. GPT-4 finished training g 18mo ago…plenty of time to clean up this mess, if there had been a will
• cmiles74 3y ago
  The NYT needs to increase profits every quarter, just like everyone else. I have no doubt they will license their content to OpenAI. With the issue unsettled legally, right now, I suspect the NYT doesn't think OpenAI is offering them a fair deal.
  • joelwilliamson 3y ago
    Privately controlled companies need to do what their controllers think is most important. If the Sulzbergers think taking a stand on AI is more important than profit, they can go a long time without increasing profits.
    • artninja1988 3y ago
      The nyt isn't taking a stance against OpenAI. This is simply a negotiating tactic to get money for licensing
      • quonn 3y ago
        We don‘t know their personal motivation. They may very well dislike AI.
    • golly_ned 3y ago
      Surprisingly (at least to me), NYT is public.
• nhinck2 3y ago
  > what would the effects be on the competitiveness of the US AI industry against other countries that aren't beholden to the ruling? If it is found to be breach of copyright then the berne convention comes into play which makes it hard(er) for international offerings to exist.
• devjab 3y ago
  For enterprise solutions, it’s hard to imagine a viable competitor that wouldn’t be beholden to similar rules. At least here in the EU where we aren’t very likely to be using non-western tech considering our privacy and national security laws. In both the finance and energy sectors we already face the prospect of needing exit plans from Microsoft products, not because of an anti-Microsoft sentiment but because the EU views it as a national security risk if too much of certain sectors rely on a single tech company. We have a lot of similar bureaucracy taking shape, so we’re not likely to turn to something like Asian AI. Hell the fact that AI vendors wouldn’t adhere to whatever legislation that comes out of these lawsuits and so on would like be enough to disqualify them as an option in the first place. I do think it’ll be interesting to see how our militaries handle the issues. Considering that is probably the one area our governments don’t want to be “behind”.
• freetanga 3y ago
  I would add what should the case be dismissed, what would be the impact for any US-based content creator. Why write a book, a movie or a song if an engine can take your work and milk it more than you…
  • concordDance 3y ago
    Worth noting that even the complete abolishment of copyright would not kill the arts entirely. There would still be many who make it to be heard, to bring joy to others or as a patreon type arrangement.
  • logicchains 3y ago
    Most books, movies and songs make their creators no money at all. The famous, profitable ones are a very small fraction. Creatives create because they enjoy creating. And for the possibility of fame, which doesn't require copyright, as evidenced by all the influencers who achieve fame in spite of producing no media whatsoever apart from videos of themselves.
• empath-nirvana 3y ago
  The law tends to follow the money. I just don't see a future where a copyright ruling kills AI dead. If the courts rule in favor of NYT, congress will just change the law.
  • quonn 3y ago
    That seems like an opinion from within the tech bubble. There is a vast world outside and most people and companies have a completely different perspective.
  • Ekaros 3y ago
    Currently I would say that money is on the side of content producers, not the AI companies... As there is lot of parties that are extremely happy in limiting what AI can produce...
• Qem 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? Probably none. They can just open a subsidiary there and siphon the same data to train their models.
• sevensevennine 3y ago
  1. _Material_ licensing fees for use of protected content. NYT will have grounds for punitive damages (over 100K per work per infringing use), enough money to make OpenAI and even Microsoft come to the negotiating table. 2. Open door for everyone else whose content has been copied to demand payment. 3. Japan aside*, I'm not sure how a decisive victory for NYT fails to affect companies in other countries. Other countries will certainly take a US opinion into account. Furthermore, nothing whatsoever would prevent NYT from suing for infringement in France, Germany, etc. A number of European countries are _much_ more comfortable with compulsory licensing than the US is.** I will not be surprised at all if Germany, Denmark, Sweden etc impose an AI-training license that companies have to pay to train or even use AI models. Could be based on employees, users, revenue, etc. They've been doing this for decades for other forms of mechanical reproduction, so it seems a reasonable path forward. * I've seen reports that Japan has declared that it will not enforce copyright against organizations for training models on copyright-protected works. I don't know whether this means that _everything_ is fair game in Japan-- it could mean that training won't be enforced, but commercial use of models trained on protected works could be. I think it's somewhat harder to argue against training a model than it is against leveraging a trained model for commercial purposes. ** AFAIK, the only use for compulsory licensing in the US is musical performance. 4. "Surely one can't get licenses"... collective licensing would be a path forward for which there's a little more history in the US than there is for compulsory licensing. In a collective licensing model, OpenAI/Microsoft/Company X would be able to purchase a license priced by revenue/employees/users etc, and funds would be distributed to participating copyright holders. For that to work, you need some kind of agency that has a ton of significant copyright holders. If some agency were able to get to a critical mass , that could happen without Congressional action. Congress could also step into the problem in a couple of ways. They could wave a wand and make the problem go away for OpenAI/Microsoft/everyone else, or they could explicitly require some kind of license. I'd be shocked if Congress handled this productively _at all_; these issues are incredibly fraught in the best of times, Congress has been terrible for years at any kind of precise technical work, and the current Congress is uniquely incompetent. I expect that if Congress accomplishes anything on this topic in the next couple of years, it will turn out to be awful for everyone.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
  It could go either way. Since others have laid out why it might benefit other countries, I'll lay out why it might benefit the US, from the perspective of an ML researcher since long before the hype arrived. AI is only useful in so far as it's grounded in reality. If you ask it how tall the empire state building is, the answer has to be in some way derived from how tall it really is. Even creative writing is only useful in so far as how it's grounded in real life human experience. This is all to say that a bunch of people need to keep writing stuff about the real world for models to keep up with the real world. I'd say the ideal scenario for US AI development is: 1) People keep making high quality data grounded in real world USA 2) That data is easily accessible for research purposes 3) That data is usable for commercial purposes (but might require more work than for research purposes) A ruling for NYT here might keep good data more widely produced and available. Research legality is almost surely not going to be affected, so keeping data produced and available is key to keeping domestic research going strong and keeping talent here. A ruling against NYT might mean all the new grounded-in-reality data goes behind closed doors. And even though the legality of research isn't in question, that would make the research harder. It would be easier to commercially use what you can find, but it could be garbage-in-garbage-out in the sense of quality data becoming hidden.
• hibikir 3y ago
  Big Tech might actually prefer it: On one end, they lose a whole lot of money by having to license scraping a bunch of sources, but on the other hand, no open source model, and no small company, has a prayer of building a model legally. It's not even down to the NYT and such: Think facebook, or reddit, suddenly being able to charge others for their massive amount of data, while they force anyone posting there to make their content usable for their own training to post there at all. Imagine a world where, say, Microsoft buys the times, just because it's better for them to not just have the training data, but to tell every competitor to get bent if they want a license. 'Google buys Disney for the training data'. If AI is that useful, and we make copyright that strong, what we might see is ailing media companies being bought out by tech. Ultimately IP law is about the tradeoff of more original content and more usefulness for the world, and AI massively changes where the center of balance is. So I don't expect a ruling for the NYT to remain the law of the land for very long, just due to economic pressures. Ultimately it doesn't matter which side people like aesthetically: If an AI trained with no regard for copyright is that much more useful than one that quotes every source and pays it some money, then piracy will ensure. If it doesn't really help, then copyright will keep being very strong. It's not even a matter of countries, but hackers. Would Aaron Swartz, working on his own LLM, pay for copyright dues or not? Because there's enough people in tech with that mindset that we'll end up with LLMs trained by a group that thinks like he did. We will have laws, people in places that aren't subjected to our laws, and pirates. It's now it always works.
  • Salgat 3y ago
    Companies that don't operate within the West's legal scope will become dominate and companies like Google and Microsoft will suffer for it, so big companies definitely don't want NYT winning. You think Chinese companies would shy away from offering a ChatGPT replacement to the West if the US stopped offering those services? And as a bonus, they get to inject all the political bias they please in this monopolized product.
  • golly_ned 3y ago
    Insightful comment -- data licensing will become a much more valuable business. That's the context with the NYTimes lawsuit -- they were negotiating a data licensing contract with OpenAI, who were dragging their feet, doubtlessly continuing to scrape. This plata o plomo lawsuit is strategically smart for NYTimes.
• tensor 3y ago
  One would hope that the outcome would be that NYT would be immediately delisted from all search engines, as being included requires AI learning from their content to index it. We don't need the NYT as a source to build AI systems.