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 abou

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?