6 ms·

OpenAI claims The New York Times tricked ChatGPT into copying its articles

42 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
> or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts even if that were true, is it really a defence? > It said AI tools have to incorporate copyrighted works to “represent the full diversity and breadth of human intelligence and experience.” that sounds like an appeal "our product isn't much use if we can't violate copyright"
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  The government gets to violate intellectual property in the interest of national security whenever it deems fit. I take building the first AGI to be in the same category.
  - Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
    > I take building the first AGI to be in the same category. That's quite the leap. Some don't even think AGI is possible. And some of those that do, don't think LLMs are on the path. Even if we assume it is, there is a significant amount of non-copyrighted text available to train with. The difference being ChatGPT needs text that provides value in the ChatGPT product for the general audience.
  - Slartie 3y ago
    If you don't happen to be "the government", it's not exactly in your power to decide that.
    - unsupp0rted 3y ago
      It’s in the government’s power to decide that AGI is worth carving out gaping exceptions for. Even for private companies. If we were to get AGI in a few years, the ends would absolutely justify the means.
      - Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
        All that needs is for someone to demonstrate the viability of AGI in those circumstances. Is all that holds back AGI the volume of data? If so, how much data is needed?
        unsupp0rted 3y ago
        All that holds back AGI is probably not the volume of data. We're still missing key discoveries. But giving an LLM loads of data might turn out to have been a necessary condition on the road to developing AGI.
- Arnt 3y ago
  Yes, that's a defense. Twice over. I bought an MP3 album from Amazon last weekend. One of the many things I got from that purchase was the ability to copy that album, which would be a copyright violation. That doesn't make the purchase unjustifiable, immoral or illegal — my actual use for the album justifies the purchase. The possible copyright violation is irrelevant. People will try to trick you with statements that mention something bad and omit everything good. Don't let them. Think about what's omitted. Does chatgpt get anything good, legal, useful from reading NYT? I'd say it does. For example, it gets the knowledge necessary to explain things in three paragraphs, partly based on NYT articles. And partly based on Wikipedia, which in turn is based on the NYT. OpenAI is saying that training to providing a three-paragraph summary of recent events is fair use of newspapers, and that such training is not realistically possible without copyrighted materials. It's saying that if you make copyright violations impossible instead of difficult, then you can't use the articles fairly either. Sounds persuasive to me. There's a second aspect, less important IMO: de minimis non curat lex. "The law does not concern itself with trifles" basically. If OpenAI made it really difficult to make GTP do a certain thing, if you have to try many times and it's not even clear whether each attempt succeeded, then the possibility of doing that thing isn't a matter of law, says that principle.
  - MattDaEskimo 3y ago
    Your comparison to the Amazon mp3s doesn't match at all the current, unprecedented situation. The obvious issue is that copyrighted material was used without permission, and an opt-out feature was introduced without any way to remove already used training data. If the copyrighted data that OpenAI is copying is causing financial harm to the rightful owner there is certainely grounds for copyright infringement. This is not fair use. It is not fair to try and draw metaphors.
    - Arnt 3y ago
      We use copyrighted materials all the time without permission. You and I both read the Verge article without the Verge's permission. Reading is the intended and most common use of the Verge's articles, and neither of us asked for permission. I didn't print that one but I often do print, always without asking anyone's permission. Copyright has that name because copying is exceptionally protected; general use is not. You can argue that training is a kind of copying, since it involves copying of things from RAM to RAM, etc. I find that difficult, since we've established that e.g. this browser's copying of web page contents from RAM to RAM isn't. If you don't argue that training is copying, then you can argue that since training is a necessary prelude to copying, it should be treated like copying legally. I disagree, because various kinds of fair use also has the training as a necessary prelude (and, uh, the purchase I mentioned could also be a necessary prelude to copying, if my goal was to copy the album).
- justanotherjoe 3y ago
  it's an appeal to the common good. Which is persuasive and always been how i see it. I think everyone here is motivated by greed but there is a huge common good from chatgpt.being able to read news articles. Off the top of my head: fake news detection.
- dangus 3y ago
  It definitely isn’t a good defense. This would be like if you were able to say some magic words to goad Google Search into giving you a copy of Avatar: The Way of Water. Even worse, the movie would be a file hosted and distributed by Google directly.
- gooob 3y ago
  they shouldn't of ever made it into a "product". it wasn't ready. this is still a new technology and a new tool in a unfinished early stage in its development. it is still in testing phase. companies shouldn't be trying to make money off of it yet.
blagie 3y ago
I'd buy OpenAI's claims if it were still a non-profit working for the public good. As a non-profit-turned-sleazy-get-rich-quick scheme, I do not. And yes, that is a valid argument. The fair use test looks at: 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; 2. the nature of the copyrighted work; 3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. #1 flipped around when OpenAI turned evil. #2 is "everything." #3 is "all of it." #4 is "increasingly significant." At this point, OpenAI is batting 0/4.
- NemoNobody 3y ago
  How exactly did OpenAI become evil? It was silly to think that with Microsoft's investment that they wouldn't benefit directly from ChatGPT. What I find interesting is that Microsoft, with Copilot, has made by far the most accessible iteration of LLMs and have yes incorporated it into their products but without a paywall - no account necessary, just use Bing for example. Given that the vast majority of people still use a Microsoft platform for actual computing I'm thrilled with the way they've adopted this tech, as it will truly bring AI to the masses in a way that really only Microsoft can. Integration with Microsoft Word for example - that just changes things. I have generated images in MS Paint, so far for no cost - that's huge. Regular people, with no expertise can do that - that is the entire point of this revolution. Additionally, this NYT lawsuit was always going to happen - we kinda need a Microsoft behind a huge, publicly accessible, LLM to combat any attempts to shut this down. How many models would survive an NYT lawsuit?
  - blagie 3y ago
    * Virtually nothing is open. The "Open" in OpenAI is dead. * It split from a non-profit into a non-profit/for-profit hybrid * Most people are at the for-profit and appear to see it as a normal startup get-rich-quick scheme I don't see anything you're writing as being wrong is e.g. I saw a startup doing it. However, OpenAI was founded precisely so that where AI goes isn't driven by startup market incentives. We do need an organization like that, very badly. OpenAI sucked up the air to where others weren't started, and it's perhaps too late.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
OpenAI seems like an untrustworthy organization that's fundamentally built around achieving AGI at which point nothing will matter anymore. They have no long term concern for the web. They crawl everything, give nothing back, and it won't matter, because once we have AGI we will not need websites anymore. I started using phind[1] recently, which is better and shows links in every answer. [1]: https://www.phind.com https://www.phind.com
- karmakaze 3y ago
  The way phind operates makes sense. When writing an essay, it's good form to include a bibliography of the main works that influenced your writing. Similarly for scientific papers to cite prior art which is extended.
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  Interesting, I think that might have been what the original OpenAI was about. My take on it is that they're now doing the opposite, they're not building some AGI, they're pushing a glorified mass plagiarism machine. They built a machine that downloads a load of copyrighted data, stores it and then serves up copyrighted material and variations of copyrighted material. Their only defence is pretending the theft machine is actually basically human and therefore we should apply vastly different copyright law standards to it than we apply to The Pirate Bay.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  And they won't create AGI either.
- pests 3y ago
  I mean they literally tell people money won't be worth anything after AGI so any investments should be treated as a "donation"
gregw2 3y ago
OpenAI’s claim that it got the content from third party sites raises an intriguing twist to this copyright equities problem that at least I haven’t thought about. It wasn’t clear from the article whether that “third party website NYTimes content” was authorized or not, but as a news reader I know first hand NYTimes syndicates its content to a ton of other (local but even big city) newspapers which may not have the reporters/skills, or scraping defenses of NY times, and whose sites and citations almost certainly do not have clear metadata on who the copyright holder is. I wonder if that’s part of the problem. OpenAI makes it sound like it’s not their fault, they would abide by NYTimes wishes if they would/could, but their business model and technical architecture cavalier/dependent being allowed to copy others’ content. Their engineers have prioritized either technical glory of building AI .. or avoiding existential risks… but have not (yet) apparently done the ethically appropriate work of determining copyright and licensing ownership of content they use. That’s an annoying AI problem, of the unsexy kind, an anti-hacker thing to do but potentially the right thing to do. (Otherwise it’s just glorified techie plagiarism, right?) So much of this is a recapitulation of themes from early search engine days and the thinking thereafter (“code is law”). I am pulling out the popcorn and interested to see how it shakes out. On an only slightly related angle, if a NYTimes article is syndicated on a thousand other websites, does its word frequency/adjacency/etc rating get more heavily weighted in the model and how does OpenAI control for that? Or is that a feature, not a bug? In either case, how will does that fit in the architecture of control of this new system… or what does it imply about its eventual abuse/manipulation by spammers?
huitzitziltzin 3y ago
I am not a lawyer and for all I know this could be “fair use”. I leave that to courts and legislators. This claim by OpenAI seems false though: “The company recently made … [an argument] to the UK House of Lords, claiming no AI system like ChatGPT can be built without access to copyrighted content.” What does OpenAI want the system to do that requires copyrighted content? The universe of material out of copyright is extremely large. Is it not fit for the (unclear?) purpose or is it just more expensive to access?? Especially if they are not simultaneously able to eliminate the risk that the system then regurgitates it verbatim, which (IANAL!) looks like a copyright violation. I would not want to kill this very promising (though wildly overrated) technology w/ bad regulations but copyright is important and should be respected.
- shkkmo 3y ago
  > What does OpenAI want the system to do that requires copyrighted content? The universe of material out of copyright is extremely large And extremely out of date given the ridiculous lengths that copyright lasts. If you want a system that synthesizes recent information, you need to train on copyrighted material.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] Lots more discussion here on the actual post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915673

42 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

> or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts even if that were true, is it really a defence? > It said AI tools have to incorporate copyrighted works to “represent the full diversity and breadth of human intelligence and experience.” that sounds like an appeal "our product isn't much use if we can't violate copyright"

unsupp0rted 3y ago
The government gets to violate intellectual property in the interest of national security whenever it deems fit. I take building the first AGI to be in the same category.
- Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
  > I take building the first AGI to be in the same category. That's quite the leap. Some don't even think AGI is possible. And some of those that do, don't think LLMs are on the path. Even if we assume it is, there is a significant amount of non-copyrighted text available to train with. The difference being ChatGPT needs text that provides value in the ChatGPT product for the general audience.
- Slartie 3y ago
  If you don't happen to be "the government", it's not exactly in your power to decide that.
  - unsupp0rted 3y ago
    It’s in the government’s power to decide that AGI is worth carving out gaping exceptions for. Even for private companies. If we were to get AGI in a few years, the ends would absolutely justify the means.
    - Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
      All that needs is for someone to demonstrate the viability of AGI in those circumstances. Is all that holds back AGI the volume of data? If so, how much data is needed?
      - unsupp0rted 3y ago
        All that holds back AGI is probably not the volume of data. We're still missing key discoveries. But giving an LLM loads of data might turn out to have been a necessary condition on the road to developing AGI.
Arnt 3y ago
Yes, that's a defense. Twice over. I bought an MP3 album from Amazon last weekend. One of the many things I got from that purchase was the ability to copy that album, which would be a copyright violation. That doesn't make the purchase unjustifiable, immoral or illegal — my actual use for the album justifies the purchase. The possible copyright violation is irrelevant. People will try to trick you with statements that mention something bad and omit everything good. Don't let them. Think about what's omitted. Does chatgpt get anything good, legal, useful from reading NYT? I'd say it does. For example, it gets the knowledge necessary to explain things in three paragraphs, partly based on NYT articles. And partly based on Wikipedia, which in turn is based on the NYT. OpenAI is saying that training to providing a three-paragraph summary of recent events is fair use of newspapers, and that such training is not realistically possible without copyrighted materials. It's saying that if you make copyright violations impossible instead of difficult, then you can't use the articles fairly either. Sounds persuasive to me. There's a second aspect, less important IMO: de minimis non curat lex. "The law does not concern itself with trifles" basically. If OpenAI made it really difficult to make GTP do a certain thing, if you have to try many times and it's not even clear whether each attempt succeeded, then the possibility of doing that thing isn't a matter of law, says that principle.
- MattDaEskimo 3y ago
  Your comparison to the Amazon mp3s doesn't match at all the current, unprecedented situation. The obvious issue is that copyrighted material was used without permission, and an opt-out feature was introduced without any way to remove already used training data. If the copyrighted data that OpenAI is copying is causing financial harm to the rightful owner there is certainely grounds for copyright infringement. This is not fair use. It is not fair to try and draw metaphors.
  - Arnt 3y ago
    We use copyrighted materials all the time without permission. You and I both read the Verge article without the Verge's permission. Reading is the intended and most common use of the Verge's articles, and neither of us asked for permission. I didn't print that one but I often do print, always without asking anyone's permission. Copyright has that name because copying is exceptionally protected; general use is not. You can argue that training is a kind of copying, since it involves copying of things from RAM to RAM, etc. I find that difficult, since we've established that e.g. this browser's copying of web page contents from RAM to RAM isn't. If you don't argue that training is copying, then you can argue that since training is a necessary prelude to copying, it should be treated like copying legally. I disagree, because various kinds of fair use also has the training as a necessary prelude (and, uh, the purchase I mentioned could also be a necessary prelude to copying, if my goal was to copy the album).
justanotherjoe 3y ago
it's an appeal to the common good. Which is persuasive and always been how i see it. I think everyone here is motivated by greed but there is a huge common good from chatgpt.being able to read news articles. Off the top of my head: fake news detection.
dangus 3y ago
It definitely isn’t a good defense. This would be like if you were able to say some magic words to goad Google Search into giving you a copy of Avatar: The Way of Water. Even worse, the movie would be a file hosted and distributed by Google directly.
gooob 3y ago
they shouldn't of ever made it into a "product". it wasn't ready. this is still a new technology and a new tool in a unfinished early stage in its development. it is still in testing phase. companies shouldn't be trying to make money off of it yet.

blagie 3y ago

I'd buy OpenAI's claims if it were still a non-profit working for the public good. As a non-profit-turned-sleazy-get-rich-quick scheme, I do not. And yes, that is a valid argument. The fair use test looks at: 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; 2. the nature of the copyrighted work; 3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. #1 flipped around when OpenAI turned evil. #2 is "everything." #3 is "all of it." #4 is "increasingly significant." At this point, OpenAI is batting 0/4.

NemoNobody 3y ago
How exactly did OpenAI become evil? It was silly to think that with Microsoft's investment that they wouldn't benefit directly from ChatGPT. What I find interesting is that Microsoft, with Copilot, has made by far the most accessible iteration of LLMs and have yes incorporated it into their products but without a paywall - no account necessary, just use Bing for example. Given that the vast majority of people still use a Microsoft platform for actual computing I'm thrilled with the way they've adopted this tech, as it will truly bring AI to the masses in a way that really only Microsoft can. Integration with Microsoft Word for example - that just changes things. I have generated images in MS Paint, so far for no cost - that's huge. Regular people, with no expertise can do that - that is the entire point of this revolution. Additionally, this NYT lawsuit was always going to happen - we kinda need a Microsoft behind a huge, publicly accessible, LLM to combat any attempts to shut this down. How many models would survive an NYT lawsuit?
- blagie 3y ago
  * Virtually nothing is open. The "Open" in OpenAI is dead. * It split from a non-profit into a non-profit/for-profit hybrid * Most people are at the for-profit and appear to see it as a normal startup get-rich-quick scheme I don't see anything you're writing as being wrong is e.g. I saw a startup doing it. However, OpenAI was founded precisely so that where AI goes isn't driven by startup market incentives. We do need an organization like that, very badly. OpenAI sucked up the air to where others weren't started, and it's perhaps too late.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

OpenAI seems like an untrustworthy organization that's fundamentally built around achieving AGI at which point nothing will matter anymore. They have no long term concern for the web. They crawl everything, give nothing back, and it won't matter, because once we have AGI we will not need websites anymore. I started using phind[1] recently, which is better and shows links in every answer. [1]: https://www.phind.com https://www.phind.com

karmakaze 3y ago
The way phind operates makes sense. When writing an essay, it's good form to include a bibliography of the main works that influenced your writing. Similarly for scientific papers to cite prior art which is extended.
SilverBirch 3y ago
Interesting, I think that might have been what the original OpenAI was about. My take on it is that they're now doing the opposite, they're not building some AGI, they're pushing a glorified mass plagiarism machine. They built a machine that downloads a load of copyrighted data, stores it and then serves up copyrighted material and variations of copyrighted material. Their only defence is pretending the theft machine is actually basically human and therefore we should apply vastly different copyright law standards to it than we apply to The Pirate Bay.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
And they won't create AGI either.
pests 3y ago
I mean they literally tell people money won't be worth anything after AGI so any investments should be treated as a "donation"

gregw2 3y ago

OpenAI’s claim that it got the content from third party sites raises an intriguing twist to this copyright equities problem that at least I haven’t thought about. It wasn’t clear from the article whether that “third party website NYTimes content” was authorized or not, but as a news reader I know first hand NYTimes syndicates its content to a ton of other (local but even big city) newspapers which may not have the reporters/skills, or scraping defenses of NY times, and whose sites and citations almost certainly do not have clear metadata on who the copyright holder is. I wonder if that’s part of the problem. OpenAI makes it sound like it’s not their fault, they would abide by NYTimes wishes if they would/could, but their business model and technical architecture cavalier/dependent being allowed to copy others’ content. Their engineers have prioritized either technical glory of building AI .. or avoiding existential risks… but have not (yet) apparently done the ethically appropriate work of determining copyright and licensing ownership of content they use. That’s an annoying AI problem, of the unsexy kind, an anti-hacker thing to do but potentially the right thing to do. (Otherwise it’s just glorified techie plagiarism, right?) So much of this is a recapitulation of themes from early search engine days and the thinking thereafter (“code is law”). I am pulling out the popcorn and interested to see how it shakes out. On an only slightly related angle, if a NYTimes article is syndicated on a thousand other websites, does its word frequency/adjacency/etc rating get more heavily weighted in the model and how does OpenAI control for that? Or is that a feature, not a bug? In either case, how will does that fit in the architecture of control of this new system… or what does it imply about its eventual abuse/manipulation by spammers?

huitzitziltzin 3y ago

I am not a lawyer and for all I know this could be “fair use”. I leave that to courts and legislators. This claim by OpenAI seems false though: “The company recently made … [an argument] to the UK House of Lords, claiming no AI system like ChatGPT can be built without access to copyrighted content.” What does OpenAI want the system to do that requires copyrighted content? The universe of material out of copyright is extremely large. Is it not fit for the (unclear?) purpose or is it just more expensive to access?? Especially if they are not simultaneously able to eliminate the risk that the system then regurgitates it verbatim, which (IANAL!) looks like a copyright violation. I would not want to kill this very promising (though wildly overrated) technology w/ bad regulations but copyright is important and should be respected.

shkkmo 3y ago
> What does OpenAI want the system to do that requires copyrighted content? The universe of material out of copyright is extremely large And extremely out of date given the ridiculous lengths that copyright lasts. If you want a system that synthesizes recent information, you need to train on copyrighted material.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] Lots more discussion here on the actual post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915673