11 ms·
OpenAI and journalism
- Imnimo 3y agoI'm sympathetic to the idea that training is fair use. I'm much less sympathetic to the "it's a bug" defense on regurgitation. Ultimately, if your system is reproducing copyrighted material, it seems like you're in violation. I'm not sure "we're trying our best to make it not do that" gets you out of that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- huytersd 3y agoSure it is. If you see a violation, you flag it like YouTube and add it as a exception that won’t show up again in the RHLF.
- jonathankoren 3y agoYouTube can just set a flag to show video X. LLMs don't work that way.
- huytersd 3y agoSure you can. You filter out the specific text post output.
- rmorey 3y agoI think it is relevant to the claim that GPT serves as a replacement for reading the NYT, which is an important prong to the infringement case. If it can only regurgitate <1% of articles in full text, i think that's a much less strong of a case than if it can regurgitate a significant fraction
- imjonse 3y agoI am not sure that reading even a verbatim NYT article from say 2017 that is in the training data is a replacement for reading the NYT which is mostly current news. So it is not similar to how news orgs sued Google for showing their content in real time. It is still copyright infringement of course, I am not siding with OpenAI here. ChatGPT can replace the NYT archives (a paid service?) though.
- altruios 3y agoAI is merely exposing how insane copyright law is. Using public facing data for training is exactly as legal as looking at that data yourself. An AI regurgitating information is exactly as legal as a human doing it. If you are allowed to - in a public square - recite from memory an article you read on the internet... if that is legal: then an AI doing the equivalent must also legal. This is a truth: because (to reiterate a basic fact) the training data (the text) simply does not exist in the LLM. What does exist is a set of weights and biases that are a representation of that data (a model). To say a model even is reciting data is inaccurate... With that said - big companies are not your friend - open source development of AI is the only way to go. Transparency is key to healthy development.
- rmorey 3y ago> If you are allowed to - in a public square - recite from memory an article you read on the internet You are in fact not allowed to do that
- Terretta 3y ago>> If you are allowed to - in a public square - recite from memory an article you read on the internet > You are in fact not allowed to do that You're arguing poetry “recitals” aren't legal? Copyright law is designed to protect original work from being used in a way that could harm the creator's interests, typically economically. In the case of a public recital, we have: 1. Fair Use presuming it's a one-time event, non-commercial, with no impact on market value 2. Public Performance generally means plays, music, movies, things that are a "performance". Reciting the article isn't the performance of something designed to be a performance, in fact it's arguably transformative. 3. Copyright infringement usually concerns reproduction, distribution, or commercial exploitation. A random, one-time, live recitation doesn't easily fall into these categories, and enforcing copyright in such a scenario would be impractical and unusual. Certainly there are ways this could go differently. If the recital were to be recorded and distributed, or if it were done 9 to 5 daily as a "news barker" reading every top article from a soapbox as an alternative to the newsstand nearby ... could be a problem.
- siva7 3y ago> "We're trying our best to make it not do that" gets you out of that. Well, if that wouldn't get you out, we wouldn't have Youtube, Google, Dropbox and any other site that probably could output copyrighted material. This would be the end of the internet idea.
- nkohari 3y agoThe DMCA has specific rules which govern sites that host user-generated content, which in turn gives the hosting site legal protection from copyright claims. At the moment, inference doesn't count as "user-generated" content and would thus (probably) not fall under DMCA rules.
- canoebuilder 3y agoWithout Google, YouTube, and Dropbox, copyrighted material would just be where the copyright holder deemed and authorized it to be. (save some amount of piracy of course) It would actually be more in line with the “Internet idea” of a decentralized network, not a massive hub and spoke arrangement. Saying, “Hey, we already have some big corporations where copyright infringement plays some role in their business model, why not add a few more in the form of “Open”AI, and whoever else.” Is not a good argument. The centralized server farms and behemoth corporations are in many ways representative of what the commercial internet has become, but are not a fulfillment of the original “internet idea.”
- siva7 3y agoPiracy was at the core of the internet idea from its very inception through hacker culture.
- canoebuilder 3y agoYou seem to have misunderstood what I was meaning to convey. I wasn’t even meaning to say much in the way of the virtues or not of piracy, or the legitimacy of copyright in it’s present form. If Google, YouTube, Dropbox didn’t exist you could still share files with your friends. Sharing a file with a friend and him benefiting in some way from that is a different thing entirely than massive centralizing corporations flouting copyright rules to benefit commercially and increase their power. More of the former, less of the latter.
- megaman821 3y agoI see a world of difference between; here are the first three paragraphs from a NYT article, what do you think the fourth is? And what is today's news and getting a paragraph from the NYT. OpenAI is saying they are going to try stop people tricking them into a copyright violation.
- __loam 3y agoThe problem is not that people can "trick" the system into reproducing this data. The problem is that the data was used for training without permission.
- megaman821 3y agoThat is left to be decided, but I don't think that is what fair use says. Should it be illegal to gather certain bits of meta data on NYT articles like: * word counts * word frequency * sentiment analysis * grammar and spelling * facts about the world
- lend000 3y agoWhile I imagine building knowledge of sources into the model itself is no trivial task, it would be so easy to search the training data against the output of the model to generate references.
- ben_w 3y agoI'm not sure either way. While my naïve thought is that factual knowledge ought to be distinct from knowledge of language comprehension, I can't think how to actually do that — how do you riff on a quotation without knowing the quotation? How can you read between the lines if you are given half a phrase where the point is in the unspoken other half? I don't know enough about amnesia to know if humans even separate these things or not. If they are separable, LLMs can be made much smaller without loss of comprehension, as "mere facts" can easily be punted off the network and into a pool of searchable documents. Without that capability, we'd have to teach the models that verbatim quotes are not allowed, just as we have to tell each other about copyright law because humans can recall things sometimes — and in mere conversation it's considered unremarkable (or even good!) if our mouths or hands reproduce perfect reproductions. Poems, pledges, anthems, quotes… …but for anyone who has memorised, say, Star Wars, you're forbidden from rather than incapable of writing down the entire script.
- butlike 3y agoOperate on the kleptomaniac to get them to stop shoplifting...
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago"If we do something illegal on accident, then it should be legal."
- visarga 3y agoIt matters if the product has other non-infringing uses.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y agoSure. If you serve something legal 99 times out of a hundred, hopefully you're only liable for 1% of the damage you would have caused if you did it 100% of the time. If you do illegal things at scale, I don't really care if you're doing legal things at an even larger scale.
- rmorey 3y ago@dang title should probably be something like, “OpenAI responds to NYTimes lawsuit”
- Centigonal 3y ago> "[...] Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- minkzilla 3y agoThe subtitle could be added? "We support journalism, partner with news organizations, and believe The New York Times lawsuit is without merit"
- minimaxir 3y agoThis blog post reads less like a defense and more like a PR piece trying to convince normal people that OpenAI is in the right in the lawsuit. Except that a) pro-AI people already know the legal issues of training models and b) anti-AI people don't care. I'm not sure who this post is for.
- siva7 3y agoMaybe there is something huge between and the world isn't as black and white as you might believe?
- minimaxir 3y agoNormally yes, but AI discourse lately is indeed that polarized and without nuance. The normals who just use the ChatGPT webapps and mobile apps don't care about the lawsuit anyways. In that case, this blog post is just a Streisand Effect.
- austhrow743 3y agoA high profile lawsuit raises questions about the stability of the service. If changing your processes to include OpenAI is expensive then that’s a big concern. Wouldn’t surprise me if their sales people are getting questioned on if the lawsuit is an existential threat and this is an attempt at giving them something.
- mikeortman 3y agobecause its a PR piece :) PR for the public, defense for the courts
- granzymes 3y agoObviously it’s a PR piece. And it’s for the same people that the New York Time’s article on their lawsuit was for. Their legal defense will come in the form of a response to the complaint and a motion to dismiss.
- DonHopkins 3y ago>intentionally manipulating our models to regurgitate is not an appropriate use of our technology and is against our terms of use What if I paste in some of my own code for ChatGPT to review and it's so terrible it barfs? Does that mean I violated the terms of use? https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-gpt4-programming-cybercode-tutorial-with-cyber-c0mb1n4t0r-ddfdf82a84d https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-gpt4-programming...
- _jab 3y agoI'm increasingly of the opinion that publicly available models should be required to disclose the data they are trained on. Perhaps not necessarily the raw data itself, but at least a description of what the datasets are. I get the sense that there would be more backlash against these models which would drive us more quickly towards a lasting resolution if people better understood how their data is being used.
- butlike 3y agoMicrosoft's can search the open internet. That'd be a long disclosure list!
- yunwal 3y agoThat's not what training data means
- cma 3y agoIsn't it considered one-shot learning training it within the context window? There were lots of glowing reports of how well it can do one/few shot learning that way. I don't think that training on copywritten data is necessarily wrong, just pointing out that doing so within the context window rather than at weight training time might not be so different.
- yunwal 3y agoI’m not sure what is meant by this. There’s no “training” happening within the context window, at least not by the commonly-used definition of training, it’s all just part of the input. If you’re asking whether you can reverse-index search copywritten text and feed it into an AI model without permission, that’s been happening for years.
- cma 3y agoFor example, within the context window giving it 5 examples of a problem in a class it has never seen, with answers, and then asking it to solve a sixth was given as one of the amazing few-shot learning examples. It could potentially do similar searching by the internet for similar things to your question and then figuring out how to derive the answer, without finding an exact answer match directly.
- ironlake 3y agoFair use also implies you legally acquired the content to begin with. They trained the data on pirated collections of text. If they had bought a copy of each magazine or book – just one copy – then maybe it's fair use. They couldn't even be bothered to do that.
- imjonse 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yinser 3y agoFor once Jason on the All In podcast had an interesting point that you could see bolt-on data sources to your ChatGPT experience where you opt-in to having NYT available to the ChatGPT retrieval step. There's no reason that a data provider shouldn't be paid for the information they create, and I think most of HN would agree with that. The problem is how do you know a model didn't bypass your walls to include your data in the model itself, or as part of retrieval.
- endisneigh 3y agoIf data for machine usage is fair use why don’t they open up their model?
- TeMPOraL 3y agoBecause it's about copy rights, not copy obligations. Fair use only applies to works you can use; it doesn't force their original authors/owners to publish them in the first place.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xeckr 3y agoI don't see there being any basis to the claim that training is fair use, which is the premise their argument rests on.
- __loam 3y agoThere's a lot of basis for claiming training is fair use. I would prefer it if it wasn't and I think using people's work to create competing product is obviously not fair use, but there's strong arguments on either side imo. It's a complex question that will be settled in court and possibly with new laws.
- rmorey 3y ago(not making a argument for either side) I believe the Google Books decision is probably the strongest precedent for this in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
- maronato 3y agoThe conclusion of the appeal reads: > Google's unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. Google's commercial nature and profit motivation do not justify denial of fair use. IMO this is very different from what OpenAI is doing. - The purpose of Google books was to search for content and then use the results of the search to buy the books from the original publishers. OpenAI doesn’t attribute results nor provides a way to pay for the content it returns. - Google books doesn’t provide the entire book as a response from the query, only the snippet with the result. OpenAI does return entire articles verbatim or paraphrased as result of queries. - Users of Google Books do not use it in place of actual books. ChatGPT replaces the need to read the actual articles/sources.
- duringmath 3y agoOf course it's fair use. It's a transformative application of copyrighted materials it's the textbook definition of fair use, and anyone pretending it isn't because of some anti generative AI luddite sentiment is risking to destroy a precedent on which much of the modern internet is built.
- minimaxir 3y agoThe "is it transformative?" question is the heart of the lawsuit, given that the NYT demonstrated that ChatGPT outputted nontransformative NYT articles.
- duringmath 3y agoEven if it does output training articles verbatim it's still transformative, mainly because that's not its primary application.
- minimaxir 3y agoWhat is the primary application of a LLM other than outputting text?
- duringmath 3y agoWell it depends on intent, in chatgpts case it's responding to users prompts. And it's not really the best way to read those articles that's just a byproduct of the training process.
- thinkingtoilet 3y agoPlease read the article. It's not about transformative use.
- __loam 3y agoWhether something is transformative is only one of four factors that is considered when determining if something is fair use.
- paxys 3y agoComes off as a weak response IMO. * They allow an opt out for training – but it was introduced in August 2023 and they don't retroactively clean up their model once you do opt out. * Regurgitation is a rare bug – doesn't mean it isn't a problem, or one they cannot be sued over. * Prompts that get ChatGPT to regurgitate are "not typical or allowed user activity" – this is the weakest excuse of all. It is their responsibility to control user behavior on a system they built. If I can type something in and get the response I want then I am using it in the intended way. Otherwise nothing on the internet can ever be illegal, because hey the user was the one who typed the URL.
- butlike 3y ago1. You can't unlearn something 2. If it's right, it's right. Why dilute the answer? 3. What happened to personal responsibility? Guns don't kill people, people kill people.
- unethical_ban 3y ago1. Yes you can. You can delete the training models and progress made with copyrighted material. Of course, they don't want to do that.
- itishappy 3y ago1. That's the problem. 2. Copyright. If it's a right, it's a right. 3. This is not a universally agreed upon position.
- endisneigh 3y agoYou can definitely unlearn things with respect to LLM. You retrain. It’s expensive for them, boo hoo.
- minimaxir 3y agoLLMs can't "unlearn" even with additional finetuning. Content drifts towards the newly added material, yes, but it can't forget, and artifacts will still be present.
- WhitneyLand 3y agolegal right is less important to us than being good citizens. We have led the AI industry in providing a simple opt-out process for publishers (which The New York Times adopted in August 2023) So what does this mean for all content trained before August 2023? Are you only allowed to opt out for future training?
- maronato 3y agoI don’t think they will delete their models and retrain them for every person who fills their opt out form. So yes, it’s only for future training, and IMO it’s a “please don’t use my stuff” at best. Their data collection is very much automated, so avoiding opted out content that was reposted somewhere else is likely impossible for them.
- StreetChief 3y agoyes
- CrypticShift 3y ago> Training AI models using publicly available internet materials is fair use Question: Does this apply to paywalled content too ?
- butlike 3y agoAnswer's in the statement. Paywalled content isn't publicly available.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CrypticShift 3y agoSure. What I had in mind is partial paywalls, like the NYT.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoWhy does writing about the acts of others apply a layer of ownership when the impetus was the act of another? Without them the journalist has nothing. All GPT4 is doing is writing about the act of your writing, same way a journalist only creates from the act of another, would make sense if the individuals the journo writes about got paid a percentage for the act that caused the writing. Seems hypocritical to claim the chain of writing about ends with you when you have nothing without others first acting when the page was blank.
- asylteltine 3y agoI’m not even going to read this. ClosedAI should immediately open source their dataset and release all training data.
- Workaccount2 3y agoOk, so put a policing script that checks for copywrite violation, and kicks it back to the LLM to rephrase if there is a violation. I don't see how that couldn't appease copywrite holders, shy of them actually just wanting to cripple threats to their old ways industry.
- StreetChief 3y agothey have consumed countless copyrighted works, and have admitted that without such data, their model would be pathetic in comparison to the current version.
- 23B1 3y agoOAI and other AI companies are merely hiding behind fair use, which includes - The purpose and character of the use - Whether such use is of a commercial nature - The amount of reference material used - The effect on the work's value I'm very much pro-AI but I'm not willing to sacrifice the fourth estate or erase the value of intellectual labor so some guy can by another half-million dollar watch. I hope the NYTimes succeeds in their lawsuit, not because I want to hurt OAI or because I like the Times, but because I think the more we commoditize information, the dumber we get.
- valine 3y agoThis might be a controversial take, but I just can’t imagine being emotionally invested in this whole copyright drama. What’s the use case here NYT is trying to prevent? A user spending hours to force the model to regurgitate articles that may or may not be hallucination? Sorry to say it but there are far easier ways to get around the NYT paywall. Pacifying the NYT isn’t worth it if it means we lose models like GPT4. I hope OpenAI wins this one.
- minimaxir 3y agoAny ruling on copyright in training models sets a precedent for everyone in the ML/AI space, which is a lot of people on Hacker News.
- maronato 3y agoHallucinations are a problem waiting to be solved. What happens when it is? NYT isn’t the only source affected by this. All content created and posted on the internet is subject to being used by ChatGPT. Their goal is to provide answers to any question you might have, as an alternative to browsing actual sources. If OpenAI wins and ChatGPT continues to improve, there will be no financial or social motivation to create honest content for the internet. The death of the organic internet will accelerate and all content that remains will be created by bots. Of course this is a dystopian view that may not fully realize, but if all it takes to avoid it is preventing a single corporation from succeeding, then I’m all for it.
- valine 3y agoYou really think we’re gonna be able to solve hallucination before this regurgitation problem? Please.
- visarga 3y ago> Their goal is to provide answers to any question you might have, as an alternative to browsing actual sources. You mean like the internet browsing became an alternative to actually buying newspapers? And now LLM answers an alternative to actually browsing? Let's close both the internet and AI and save journalism. Because it's gone to shit.
- mnbion 3y agoWhy is it not possible to fine-tune the models to not verbatim reproduce copyrighted material even if they are aware of the knowledge contained in the copyrighted material?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y agoThe whole opt-out thing is such a dark pattern. If we (ML researchers) knew how to cheaply remove/untrain content from an already trained model, we'd say that opt-out without untraining is wrong. But since we don't know how to do it, we throw our hands in the air and say "well we should get a free pass on other people's content, because we can't do our jobs without it, because our jobs MUST be done before we figure this out."
- dougb5 3y ago"We had explained to The New York Times that, like any single source, their content didn't meaningfully contribute to the training of our existing models and also wouldn't be sufficiently impactful for future training." I wonder how they operationalize "meaningful". After all, if the work didn't meaningfully contribute to the training of existing or future models, then why do they seem to need it in the first place?
- kromem 3y agoBecause they need the ocean, even if they don't need any individual drop within it. Relative to the rest of the data, NYT's is not meaningfully impactful. But they need the aggregate amount of data, which is why they need training to be fair use and to be opt out rather than opt in.
- dougb5 3y agoUnderstood, and that's at the core of the hustle here. At some point one of NYT's lawyers is going to point out the apparent contradiction in OpenAI saying that NYT is important enough that they need to take from them, but not important enough that their taking causes damages to them.
- kromem 3y agoActually, if you read Sy Damile's (a former General Counsel of the US Copyright office) testimony to Congress (which is really worth a read), he makes a very good point that the smaller the training data set the less likely that the resulting model would qualify for fair use of the data as it would be more likely that the model would not be transformative and would be prone to reproduce the training data. So arguably the importance of including the NYT and everyone else collectively in opt out selection is precisely because it makes the NYT individually less important in the final model.
- StreetChief 3y agoThis is the art of bullshitting.
- StreetChief 3y agoI have to pay to access/read the NYT, either in hard copy or digital forms. This content is educational for me, but I must pay for it. Why is this not the case for OpenAI? It seems like this started with Google successfully arguing that it should be able to copy books because it isn't _using_ the books directly to learn, it's only digitizing and storing them for other people to use! What a joke.
- halJordan 3y agoThat was very similar to my reaction. All the fair use rhetoric is carefully caveated to public information. NYT is not publicly accessible, it's paid access. If this argument is true then zlib does nothing illegal the Internet Archive is allowed to scan books. We can't have this it's true and false dichotomy going.
- sensanaty 3y agoWow we can opt out, how generous of the billion dollar entity controlled by M$ Training on anything should be an explicit opt-in process and they (and every other model out there) should be retrained from the ground up with only explicitly allowed materials.
- xigoi 3y ago> Our goal is to develop AI tools that empower people Proprietary software does not empower people.