6 ms·

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 r

by 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.
      - rmorey 3y ago
        > You're arguing poetry “recitals” aren't legal? No. I think the strongest point you make is the one-time thing. But I still think, in general, simply reproducing an article via speech verbatim would not be found fair use (not saying whether it should or shouldn't be, nor whether this at all applies to GPT, nor whether it's right or wrong, nor whether practically anyone would face consequence for it)
        altruios 3y ago
        Is it illegal to hallucinate and say words that happen to be verbatim a copy-write article you read once a blue moon ago? The key point is - this isn't being copied from the website, it's being generated from the model. this is not copied copywrite work being copied. What that is is speech. Is it protected speech?
        dragonwriter 3y ago
  - canoebuilder 3y ago
    In considering these things, affordances must be made to the new abilities made possible by the computational tools now at our disposal. Following your line of reasoning if it is perfectly legal to walk into a coffee shop and sit down and listen to what the people next to me are talking about, commit it to memory, even make notes about it, does it then follow that it should be perfectly legal, reasonable, and acceptable for a govt agency or some other organization to put microphones everywhere to record what everyone is talking about, then feed all this data into various databases and modeling systems? Reciting something in a park is different than selling a copyrighted print of something in a park when you don’t hold the copyright. Which is much closer to what the NYT is accusing OpenAI of. The training data not “existing” in the model is interesting, but at some point, a distinction without a difference. If I hire an autistic savant to go to a library and read all the books, then I set up a book selling service where whenever people want to buy a book I have my savant employee type out the book for them, is it then going to pass muster in a copyright case if I tell the judge “It’s okay actually, because the books don’t actually exist in my employee’s brain, merely neuronal encodings of them.” ? If I have a copyrighted image on which I don’t hold the copyright. But I want to start selling it to people, is it cool if I just run it through a lossless compression algorithm, thereby generating a new encoding of the information and then sell this new encoding along with the software and command to reverse the compression? Regarding the open source stuff, there I think you might find more favor to your arguments. But the stuff we are seeing within commercial enterprises like OpenAI and Midjourney is clearly copyright infringement. And I don’t see copyright law being insane in these cases.
    - altruios 3y ago
      It would be perfectly legal that a million government agents went it coffee shops and recorded what they heard. It is the leaving of government property on private property that is the real issue, as well as transparency... not access of information (please don't do this my government). As far as the savant reading all the books analogy goes... it's a bit off base - mostly because the AI isn't attempting to do that... it would have to be prompted specially (which as far as I understand - what's happening: people giving verbose special prompts to 'extract' copyright... which again... extract - the verbiage regenerate is better, considering there's no guarantee the generation will be a perfect reproduction...) to generated that information. What is happening, (fixing the analogy) the savant reads all the books in the library: then someone asks him to generate a brand new book... which contains some passages that happen to be like those in copy-written works... this is 100% interoperable to what human writers do all the time. Why would we ever want to punish an AI for reading and remembering better than us? On top of that imperfect reproduction is the sale as if it's the original... that's a lot of additional assumptions to make... Sadly the lossless compression is also a bad analogy. Math maps and 100% translatable and thus not change/encoding to the bits... if you compresses it lossy, to the point of doing it artistically, then... if none of the bits are the same - it's not the same picture, and doesn't hold any 'bit' of the old image. Good reply!
  - rlt 3y ago
    > What does exist is a set of weights and biases that are a representation of that data (a model) This is a distinction without a difference if the text can be reliably reproduced. For example, a trivial neural network that always outputs the text is just a fancy encoding of that text.
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.

by rmorey 3y ago

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.
    - rmorey 3y ago
      > You're arguing poetry “recitals” aren't legal? No. I think the strongest point you make is the one-time thing. But I still think, in general, simply reproducing an article via speech verbatim would not be found fair use (not saying whether it should or shouldn't be, nor whether this at all applies to GPT, nor whether it's right or wrong, nor whether practically anyone would face consequence for it)
      - altruios 3y ago
        Is it illegal to hallucinate and say words that happen to be verbatim a copy-write article you read once a blue moon ago? The key point is - this isn't being copied from the website, it's being generated from the model. this is not copied copywrite work being copied. What that is is speech. Is it protected speech?
        dragonwriter 3y ago
- canoebuilder 3y ago
  In considering these things, affordances must be made to the new abilities made possible by the computational tools now at our disposal. Following your line of reasoning if it is perfectly legal to walk into a coffee shop and sit down and listen to what the people next to me are talking about, commit it to memory, even make notes about it, does it then follow that it should be perfectly legal, reasonable, and acceptable for a govt agency or some other organization to put microphones everywhere to record what everyone is talking about, then feed all this data into various databases and modeling systems? Reciting something in a park is different than selling a copyrighted print of something in a park when you don’t hold the copyright. Which is much closer to what the NYT is accusing OpenAI of. The training data not “existing” in the model is interesting, but at some point, a distinction without a difference. If I hire an autistic savant to go to a library and read all the books, then I set up a book selling service where whenever people want to buy a book I have my savant employee type out the book for them, is it then going to pass muster in a copyright case if I tell the judge “It’s okay actually, because the books don’t actually exist in my employee’s brain, merely neuronal encodings of them.” ? If I have a copyrighted image on which I don’t hold the copyright. But I want to start selling it to people, is it cool if I just run it through a lossless compression algorithm, thereby generating a new encoding of the information and then sell this new encoding along with the software and command to reverse the compression? Regarding the open source stuff, there I think you might find more favor to your arguments. But the stuff we are seeing within commercial enterprises like OpenAI and Midjourney is clearly copyright infringement. And I don’t see copyright law being insane in these cases.
  - altruios 3y ago
    It would be perfectly legal that a million government agents went it coffee shops and recorded what they heard. It is the leaving of government property on private property that is the real issue, as well as transparency... not access of information (please don't do this my government). As far as the savant reading all the books analogy goes... it's a bit off base - mostly because the AI isn't attempting to do that... it would have to be prompted specially (which as far as I understand - what's happening: people giving verbose special prompts to 'extract' copyright... which again... extract - the verbiage regenerate is better, considering there's no guarantee the generation will be a perfect reproduction...) to generated that information. What is happening, (fixing the analogy) the savant reads all the books in the library: then someone asks him to generate a brand new book... which contains some passages that happen to be like those in copy-written works... this is 100% interoperable to what human writers do all the time. Why would we ever want to punish an AI for reading and remembering better than us? On top of that imperfect reproduction is the sale as if it's the original... that's a lot of additional assumptions to make... Sadly the lossless compression is also a bad analogy. Math maps and 100% translatable and thus not change/encoding to the bits... if you compresses it lossy, to the point of doing it artistically, then... if none of the bits are the same - it's not the same picture, and doesn't hold any 'bit' of the old image. Good reply!
- rlt 3y ago
  > What does exist is a set of weights and biases that are a representation of that data (a model) This is a distinction without a difference if the text can be reliably reproduced. For example, a trivial neural network that always outputs the text is just a fancy encoding of that text.

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.