6 ms·

I'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 rep

by Imnimo 3y ago

I'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 ago
Sure 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 ago
  YouTube can just set a flag to show video X. LLMs don't work that way.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    Sure you can. You filter out the specific text post output.
rmorey 3y ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    AI 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.
- plastic3169 3y ago
  I wish that was how it worked in music. De la soul using 1% somebody elses song in no way diminishes the original yet it is a massive problem and can block their right to republish the song in any format 30 years later.
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 ago
  The 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 ago
  Without 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 ago
    Piracy was at the core of the internet idea from its very inception through hacker culture.
    - canoebuilder 3y ago
      You 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 ago
I 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    That 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 ago
While 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.
- msp26 3y ago
  Would searching the entire corpus really be easy?
  - lend000 3y ago
    Relatively so. This is essentially a much smaller version of what a search engine does (since their sources are curated).
ben_w 3y ago
I'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 ago
Operate 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 ago
  It matters if the product has other non-infringing uses.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
    Sure. 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.

by Imnimo 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

huytersd 3y ago

Sure 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 ago
YouTube can just set a flag to show video X. LLMs don't work that way.
- huytersd 3y ago
  Sure you can. You filter out the specific text post output.

rmorey 3y ago

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  AI 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.
plastic3169 3y ago
I wish that was how it worked in music. De la soul using 1% somebody elses song in no way diminishes the original yet it is a massive problem and can block their right to republish the song in any format 30 years later.

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 ago
The 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 ago
Without 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 ago
  Piracy was at the core of the internet idea from its very inception through hacker culture.
  - canoebuilder 3y ago
    You 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 ago

I 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 ago
The 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 ago
  That 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 ago

While 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.

msp26 3y ago
Would searching the entire corpus really be easy?
- lend000 3y ago
  Relatively so. This is essentially a much smaller version of what a search engine does (since their sources are curated).

ben_w 3y ago

I'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 ago

Operate 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 ago
It matters if the product has other non-infringing uses.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
  Sure. 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.