9 ms·

OpenAI says it's "impossible" to create AI models without copyrighted material

69 points by freeqaz 3y ago

hulitu 3y ago
> OpenAI says it's "impossible" to create AI models without copyrighted material Just send the BSA to visit them. Oh, wait, they _are_ the BSA. /s How time flies.
Raed667 3y ago
Then don't
zgs 3y ago
Bollocks. There is lots of out of copyright content available. It just requires a person in the loop to assess the status. If it truely were impossible, then it sounds like they've just admitted that they should have licensed the content rather than using it without permission.
- gorkish 3y ago
  Would you be comfortable educating yourself or your own children without the use of any copyrighted material whatsoever? AI's gonna get trained on it no matter what; nobody wants a product that isn't. By the time OpenAI takes the bullet we will have killed nothing.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I mean, parents pay for that stuff. Youtube videos are monetized, books are bought, videos at school are bought by the school or licensed for educational use (schools of which are paid for via taxes). Can you really argue that people consuming copyright material aren't benefiting the copyrighter? If you can convince adverts that a scaped hit counts as an organic view, I can concede on your point of "educating yourself on copyrighted material is okay". But given NYT here, that seems to already have been a lost point. >AI's gonna get trained on it no matter what; nobody wants a product that isn't. That's fine. Just license it like everyone else that wants to use copyrighted material for commercial use. Why is that so hard? It's not like Microsoft can't bankroll it.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I don't think that educating people is even remotely in the same category as training AI models (and particularly not for training AI models meant to generate profits).
    - gorkish 3y ago
      If you have children they are already using these very models in their learning if not directly then by proxy. I would have given anything to have access to such a resource during my school years. You’re looking at the wrong end of the horse, as we say where I’m from.
- Ukv 3y ago
  > There is lots of out of copyright content available OpenAI's quote, from which the headline is derived, briefly mentions public domain content: > > Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents – it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens. I do think they're right in that you're not going to get remotely the same performance as modern LLMs if you train with solely public domain content. Licensing a sufficient amount of content could be feasible for OpenAI/Meta, but hopefully we get something that still works for smaller companies, FOSS groups, etc.
  - NewJazz 3y ago
    So OpenAI license the content they train on... They just admitted it has value.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    Their quote sounds a bit like: "Paying for what I want is too much of a hassle so I should get it for free." Even being in favor of massive copyright reform, I don't think I can get behind that argument.
    - persolb 3y ago
      I think this is an edge case where intuition breaks down. I'm not sure if my intuition is broke or yours. My intuition is that, if you publish something online and let me read it, I can use that knowledge. I can NOT flat out duplicate it for others, but I can still use the knowledge. Training OpenAI is akin to me using something I read. (Hell, most of what I know I obtained this way.) To me, the only issue is if the model is reproducing text verbatim en masse. I think my intuition above is basically where my intuition lands for search engines too. The can use datas found on the web, and can show me snippets, but I'd draw a line at them showing me all/most of an article.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  the argument is really "do you know how much it'd cost to actually properly monitor the information the use?" It's true but still breaking the law.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    It's such an odd angle that I can't believe it actually came up in a legal case. Can you imagine a lawyer representing a shoplifter with "but do you know how much an iPhone costs?" But I guess the sad fact of it all is that I'm sure they 100% anticipated lawsuits, and expected that fighting them is still cheaper than trying to license all the content properly. I doubt anyone is surprised by this lawsuit. Just disappointed that they will throw money at anyone other than the actual artists and writers.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    Or: "It wouldn't be profitable for me to check and obey the licenses on all the software libraries I want to use in my product, so obviously that means I should get to ignore them and do whatever I want."
achrono 3y ago
So much for all the altruism, and with this kind of an argument they really are scraping the bottom of the barrel -- it isn't the first time a company is lying to a government committee, it isn't the first time a company has claimed to be moral perfection incarnate only to turn out to be a non-repentant defiler, so we should all be prepared to expect worse going forward from OpenAI.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  To be fair, OpenAI made it very clear what they were about back when they ditched being open and made that multibillion dollar deal with Microsoft. Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do.
- Geezus_42 3y ago
  There's no actual altruism in "effective altruism". It's just an excuse to keep using all the same old business tactics from the past to make more money that you could ever possibly need while giving yourself a pat on the back for giving some of it to other grifters who claim they will use it to make the world a better place.
JohnFen 3y ago
Tough. OpenAI's wholesale abuse of the internet has made the internet no longer an acceptable place for me to distribute data and writing to the general public. I have no sympathy whatsoever for them.
lotsoweiners 3y ago
I can’t open a store without something to sell so it sounds like neither of us have an actual business model.
kelseyfrog 3y ago
Let them fight. Copyright transfer as it exists regarding work for hire is a legal fiction.
genman 3y ago
In principle they are not wrong as everything produced is effectively copyrighted and only released 70 years after authors death after what everything is completely outdated and irrelevant.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  It'd be the sweetest schadenfreude imaginable if Disney was working on an LLM and got hit with such a lawsuit. Especially since so many of their lauded works came from using public domain works, which would not have been public domain in time for Disney to use them.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tonetegeatinst 3y ago
I think the real crime is that they keep on getting the PR for being "open source" and for safe ai development. They arnt open sourcing their models and they are actually monetizing it. As for AI safety.....its so grey aread. Uncensored models have a place in this community, and trying to suppress them or claim their is no use for them is just insane to me. What one person views as a moral or ethical response another might view as wrong. This is all culture and also based on your country's views which help form individual perspectives. I think a big issue with AI other than the hardware barriers is that we have no clue if the amazing developments in the field will keep up with the same pace or stagnate. We can't accurately tell when we have hit the theoretical limit, or when we have true AGI.
Bjorkbat 3y ago
Oh, it’s very much possible to create AI models with copyrighted materials. The “impossible” part is turning said AI model into a cash cow without fairly compensating the original rights holder.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  what if a new ai model retains any info fed into it, such that I ask it about a book that I post excerpts into, and it remembers that for future conversations with me, and others. I'm not talking about using vector search, I mean literally it's folded back into the next 'version' of a self-evolving llm. You can't make an intelligence that functions in the real world without it knowing something about the copyrighted works out there. That's like trying to create a human brain without knowing any copywritten material, and have them fit in society.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    In that case you are feeding the LLM and that changes the problem space signifigantly towards how/if an LLM can accept copyright material. Pretty much what Youtube deals with today, In that case there would be some separate DB used to identify copyright material that it cannot use when generating art. Hopefully with drastic sanctions if it arises that it is in the LLM. Alternatively, we can go back to literal Youtube and rely on DMCA yet again. I don't think anyone desires that.
- nomel 3y ago
  Does that change with the stipulation of "with the same performance?"
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I imagine it'll be the same performance whether they stole it or paid 10 billion dollars from all consenting parties. Is there some singular source of information that is so important to scape for the sake of humanity that is unwilling to license?
Conasg 3y ago
The biggest problem as I see it is that they monetized it, on a massive scale. If this had been open source like they promised, it would seem more like fair use. But to take huge amounts of copyrighted material without consent and effectively sell access to that material? I struggle to see how that could ever be legal.
- Centigonal 3y ago
  I agree with your main point, but I want to clarify that OpenAI never promised open source. This is a pernicious misunderstanding that OpenAI has been all too happy to leave uncorrected. Open source was never part of the mission, and I can't find any place where OpenAI leadership has implied that it is or will be. From 2016: > They’d raised a billion dollars and hired an impressive team of thirty researchers—but what for? “There are twenty to thirty people in the field, including Nick Bostrom and the Wikipedia article,” Amodei said, “who are saying that the goal of OpenAI is to build a friendly A.I. and then release its source code into the world.” > “We don’t plan to release all of our source code,” Altman said. “But let’s please not try to correct that. That usually only makes it worse.” Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
  - 7e 3y ago
    Sam Altman seems like a snake from that quote.
  - Wolfbeta 3y ago
    > I can't find any place where OpenAI leadership has implied that it is or will be. have you tried saying the name out loud?
    - Centigonal 3y ago
      The name is very misleading! Was that a deliberate misdirection? Not sure. Apparently, Elon Musk takes credit for the name and wanted the company's products to be open source. However, Musk has said a lot of things about companies he is involved with that later turn out to be untrue.
zeruch 3y ago
It isn't impossible, it's just lacking the casual convenience of webscale infringement. Can't cut into those potential margins after all.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Sucks that copyright lasts so long eh?
macinjosh 3y ago
Intellectual property is a farce in the age of information.
- jMyles 3y ago
  Where is this movement being mobilized? I really hope my child (now 8) can live an adulthood free of the ridiculous notion that knowledge can be owned.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I don't know. Maybe artists who have been underpaid for decades to power billion dollar empires? This isn't new ground for them. You may not be able to own knowledge, but people sure don't want to take the time to accrue such knowledge to learn how to draw themselves. Easier to throw scraps at those who did.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
486sx33 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
stubish 3y ago
Such a terrible tragedy if a company has to give the lions share of its billions in profit to the people who made it possible. Maybe this is how the news and publishing industries get repaired.
sensanaty 3y ago
Aw the poor little entity backed by the comically evil trillion dollar megacorporation :( If they can't manage to strike out deals with content creators despite having M$' coffers at their disposal, then they should cease to exist. Let's also nuke M$ from orbit and split them up into a trillion little pieces while we're at it
- krapp 3y ago
  Of course they could - but all of the value in AI is in being able to use that copyrighted material to fake talent you don't want to pay for (or spend time creating.) Companies are firing artists and writers en masse rather than pay them to train AIs for a reason.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Every time I see "Open"AI's fraudulent name, it pisses me off. I'm sure it augurs a new era of non-open "Open[bullshit]" branding.
protocolture 3y ago
Its fairly correct. Theres no Open Source database of internet comments, websites, most pop art styles, troubleshooting detail, coding Q&A. Which is why any sane country would extend fair use to all of these things no questions asked, short of 1:1 replication. Yankistan however is not a sane country and I am expecting the outcome to these legal tests to be absolutely bonkers. >But they make money Yes, so does the guy who takes 20 public domain stories, publishes it as a collection on google books and sells it to me for 1 dollar. People act as if their models aren't hugely backed by human labor, labor that is hugely transformative and commands a decent reward.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Which is why any sane country would extend fair use to all of these things no questions asked, short of 1:1 replication. if that was all they wanted to scrape, I wouldn't mind that. Reddit et al. would have an issue, but they don't exactly compensate commenters to begin with either. But given that visual works are being copied and that they are being sued by NYT (who hired writers for over a century to produce what is now being scraped for free), it's clear that that wouldn't be enough. >so does the guy who takes 20 public domain stories, publishes it as a collection on google books and sells it to me for 1 dollar. curation is a lucrative business in the Information Era, so if there's no licensing issue I don't see the issue. I've spent days, weeks researching various problems and I'd happily pay a dollar for someone to collect a dozen good sources into one place to save me that time. If all of OpenAI's content was public domain, there would be no lawsuit.
thrill 3y ago
What makes humanity is copyrighted. Sure, let's create powerful thinking machines that understand nothing of modern society.
moogly 3y ago
So yet another one of those tech innovations with an absolutely broken business model only kept afloat by skirting the law. Got it.
_zephyr 3y ago
I do think OpenAI has a point in what they're saying: if we expect human-level competency of AI, it needs to be able to see and train on human-accessible content and ideally with a similar distribution. For example, I make an open source Firefox web extension for filtering internet content with my own classifier. That literally would not be able to exist without being able to be trained on web content, much of which is copyrighted. Requiring that I somehow either a) use only attributed data or b) detect and not use copyrighted content when trying to build something representative of my source distribution (e.g. the web) sounds like a recipe for a poor outcome. Now maybe my addon isn't your cup of tea - but what if you found out that the next generation of uBlock Origin etc. could not be as effective because of legislation because it wanted to use an AI model? Legislating too heavily around this area will, I believe, have a tremendous chilling effect for small businesses and open source folks trying to innovate in AI. I've also worked commercially in the creation of two closed source machine learning models, but the domains were restricted enough that web content was not a particularly helpful input. One did all right, and one did not. Seeing bets succeed and fail gives me appreciation for the long-term and uncertain bets that OpenAI has been making for ages finally coming to fruition. I think without businesses being willing to make those bets the GPU-hours would have been hard to pay for. I've wondered if potentially a different way out of this is not restricting the use of copyrighted material in the training process itself, but rather to instead only consider the created final works. Of course there are thorny problems there, too, but I don't see that having the same chilling effect on research and probably a lesser effect on business as well. One thing I think is clear though: we've reached a tipping point in the US similar to 1998 when the DMCA was legislated where the technology is forcing us to think carefully about what copyright means. So I have question for those on HN who have meaningfully worked in the creation of not just AI-generated content, but in the creation of some AI model that others use freely or commercially: what seem like promising paths forward here? Or to those working in copyright law (like @williamcotton): how do you see the status quo and potential paths forward?
- hostyle 3y ago
  > I do think OpenAI has a point in what they're saying: if we expect human-level competency of AI, it needs to be able to see and train on human-accessible content and ideally with a similar distribution. Any human who wants to access copyrighted works is by law required to honour the copyright - whether that means purchasing of licenses, timed rental access or immediate cease and desist of usage. Why should AI (and the billion-dollar-backed companies building them) get different treatment? Or to turn it the other way: if the billion-dollar-backed companies building AI models do get a free pass then surely humans should too?

69 points by freeqaz 3y ago

> OpenAI says it's "impossible" to create AI models without copyrighted material Just send the BSA to visit them. Oh, wait, they _are_ the BSA. /s How time flies.

Raed667 3y ago

Then don't

zgs 3y ago

Bollocks. There is lots of out of copyright content available. It just requires a person in the loop to assess the status. If it truely were impossible, then it sounds like they've just admitted that they should have licensed the content rather than using it without permission.

gorkish 3y ago
Would you be comfortable educating yourself or your own children without the use of any copyrighted material whatsoever? AI's gonna get trained on it no matter what; nobody wants a product that isn't. By the time OpenAI takes the bullet we will have killed nothing.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I mean, parents pay for that stuff. Youtube videos are monetized, books are bought, videos at school are bought by the school or licensed for educational use (schools of which are paid for via taxes). Can you really argue that people consuming copyright material aren't benefiting the copyrighter? If you can convince adverts that a scaped hit counts as an organic view, I can concede on your point of "educating yourself on copyrighted material is okay". But given NYT here, that seems to already have been a lost point. >AI's gonna get trained on it no matter what; nobody wants a product that isn't. That's fine. Just license it like everyone else that wants to use copyrighted material for commercial use. Why is that so hard? It's not like Microsoft can't bankroll it.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I don't think that educating people is even remotely in the same category as training AI models (and particularly not for training AI models meant to generate profits).
  - gorkish 3y ago
    If you have children they are already using these very models in their learning if not directly then by proxy. I would have given anything to have access to such a resource during my school years. You’re looking at the wrong end of the horse, as we say where I’m from.
Ukv 3y ago
> There is lots of out of copyright content available OpenAI's quote, from which the headline is derived, briefly mentions public domain content: > > Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents – it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens. I do think they're right in that you're not going to get remotely the same performance as modern LLMs if you train with solely public domain content. Licensing a sufficient amount of content could be feasible for OpenAI/Meta, but hopefully we get something that still works for smaller companies, FOSS groups, etc.
- NewJazz 3y ago
  So OpenAI license the content they train on... They just admitted it has value.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  Their quote sounds a bit like: "Paying for what I want is too much of a hassle so I should get it for free." Even being in favor of massive copyright reform, I don't think I can get behind that argument.
  - persolb 3y ago
    I think this is an edge case where intuition breaks down. I'm not sure if my intuition is broke or yours. My intuition is that, if you publish something online and let me read it, I can use that knowledge. I can NOT flat out duplicate it for others, but I can still use the knowledge. Training OpenAI is akin to me using something I read. (Hell, most of what I know I obtained this way.) To me, the only issue is if the model is reproducing text verbatim en masse. I think my intuition above is basically where my intuition lands for search engines too. The can use datas found on the web, and can show me snippets, but I'd draw a line at them showing me all/most of an article.
cyanydeez 3y ago
the argument is really "do you know how much it'd cost to actually properly monitor the information the use?" It's true but still breaking the law.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  It's such an odd angle that I can't believe it actually came up in a legal case. Can you imagine a lawyer representing a shoplifter with "but do you know how much an iPhone costs?" But I guess the sad fact of it all is that I'm sure they 100% anticipated lawsuits, and expected that fighting them is still cheaper than trying to license all the content properly. I doubt anyone is surprised by this lawsuit. Just disappointed that they will throw money at anyone other than the actual artists and writers.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  Or: "It wouldn't be profitable for me to check and obey the licenses on all the software libraries I want to use in my product, so obviously that means I should get to ignore them and do whatever I want."

achrono 3y ago

So much for all the altruism, and with this kind of an argument they really are scraping the bottom of the barrel -- it isn't the first time a company is lying to a government committee, it isn't the first time a company has claimed to be moral perfection incarnate only to turn out to be a non-repentant defiler, so we should all be prepared to expect worse going forward from OpenAI.

JohnFen 3y ago
To be fair, OpenAI made it very clear what they were about back when they ditched being open and made that multibillion dollar deal with Microsoft. Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do.
Geezus_42 3y ago
There's no actual altruism in "effective altruism". It's just an excuse to keep using all the same old business tactics from the past to make more money that you could ever possibly need while giving yourself a pat on the back for giving some of it to other grifters who claim they will use it to make the world a better place.

JohnFen 3y ago

Tough. OpenAI's wholesale abuse of the internet has made the internet no longer an acceptable place for me to distribute data and writing to the general public. I have no sympathy whatsoever for them.

lotsoweiners 3y ago

I can’t open a store without something to sell so it sounds like neither of us have an actual business model.

kelseyfrog 3y ago

Let them fight. Copyright transfer as it exists regarding work for hire is a legal fiction.

genman 3y ago

In principle they are not wrong as everything produced is effectively copyrighted and only released 70 years after authors death after what everything is completely outdated and irrelevant.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
It'd be the sweetest schadenfreude imaginable if Disney was working on an LLM and got hit with such a lawsuit. Especially since so many of their lauded works came from using public domain works, which would not have been public domain in time for Disney to use them.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tonetegeatinst 3y ago

I think the real crime is that they keep on getting the PR for being "open source" and for safe ai development. They arnt open sourcing their models and they are actually monetizing it. As for AI safety.....its so grey aread. Uncensored models have a place in this community, and trying to suppress them or claim their is no use for them is just insane to me. What one person views as a moral or ethical response another might view as wrong. This is all culture and also based on your country's views which help form individual perspectives. I think a big issue with AI other than the hardware barriers is that we have no clue if the amazing developments in the field will keep up with the same pace or stagnate. We can't accurately tell when we have hit the theoretical limit, or when we have true AGI.

Bjorkbat 3y ago

Oh, it’s very much possible to create AI models with copyrighted materials. The “impossible” part is turning said AI model into a cash cow without fairly compensating the original rights holder.

gremlinsinc 3y ago
what if a new ai model retains any info fed into it, such that I ask it about a book that I post excerpts into, and it remembers that for future conversations with me, and others. I'm not talking about using vector search, I mean literally it's folded back into the next 'version' of a self-evolving llm. You can't make an intelligence that functions in the real world without it knowing something about the copyrighted works out there. That's like trying to create a human brain without knowing any copywritten material, and have them fit in society.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  In that case you are feeding the LLM and that changes the problem space signifigantly towards how/if an LLM can accept copyright material. Pretty much what Youtube deals with today, In that case there would be some separate DB used to identify copyright material that it cannot use when generating art. Hopefully with drastic sanctions if it arises that it is in the LLM. Alternatively, we can go back to literal Youtube and rely on DMCA yet again. I don't think anyone desires that.
nomel 3y ago
Does that change with the stipulation of "with the same performance?"
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I imagine it'll be the same performance whether they stole it or paid 10 billion dollars from all consenting parties. Is there some singular source of information that is so important to scape for the sake of humanity that is unwilling to license?

Conasg 3y ago

The biggest problem as I see it is that they monetized it, on a massive scale. If this had been open source like they promised, it would seem more like fair use. But to take huge amounts of copyrighted material without consent and effectively sell access to that material? I struggle to see how that could ever be legal.

Centigonal 3y ago
I agree with your main point, but I want to clarify that OpenAI never promised open source. This is a pernicious misunderstanding that OpenAI has been all too happy to leave uncorrected. Open source was never part of the mission, and I can't find any place where OpenAI leadership has implied that it is or will be. From 2016: > They’d raised a billion dollars and hired an impressive team of thirty researchers—but what for? “There are twenty to thirty people in the field, including Nick Bostrom and the Wikipedia article,” Amodei said, “who are saying that the goal of OpenAI is to build a friendly A.I. and then release its source code into the world.” > “We don’t plan to release all of our source code,” Altman said. “But let’s please not try to correct that. That usually only makes it worse.” Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
- 7e 3y ago
  Sam Altman seems like a snake from that quote.
- Wolfbeta 3y ago
  > I can't find any place where OpenAI leadership has implied that it is or will be. have you tried saying the name out loud?
  - Centigonal 3y ago
    The name is very misleading! Was that a deliberate misdirection? Not sure. Apparently, Elon Musk takes credit for the name and wanted the company's products to be open source. However, Musk has said a lot of things about companies he is involved with that later turn out to be untrue.

zeruch 3y ago

It isn't impossible, it's just lacking the casual convenience of webscale infringement. Can't cut into those potential margins after all.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Sucks that copyright lasts so long eh?

macinjosh 3y ago

Intellectual property is a farce in the age of information.

jMyles 3y ago
Where is this movement being mobilized? I really hope my child (now 8) can live an adulthood free of the ridiculous notion that knowledge can be owned.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I don't know. Maybe artists who have been underpaid for decades to power billion dollar empires? This isn't new ground for them. You may not be able to own knowledge, but people sure don't want to take the time to accrue such knowledge to learn how to draw themselves. Easier to throw scraps at those who did.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

486sx33 3y ago

[dead]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

stubish 3y ago

Such a terrible tragedy if a company has to give the lions share of its billions in profit to the people who made it possible. Maybe this is how the news and publishing industries get repaired.

sensanaty 3y ago

Aw the poor little entity backed by the comically evil trillion dollar megacorporation :( If they can't manage to strike out deals with content creators despite having M$' coffers at their disposal, then they should cease to exist. Let's also nuke M$ from orbit and split them up into a trillion little pieces while we're at it

krapp 3y ago
Of course they could - but all of the value in AI is in being able to use that copyrighted material to fake talent you don't want to pay for (or spend time creating.) Companies are firing artists and writers en masse rather than pay them to train AIs for a reason.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

Every time I see "Open"AI's fraudulent name, it pisses me off. I'm sure it augurs a new era of non-open "Open[bullshit]" branding.

protocolture 3y ago

Its fairly correct. Theres no Open Source database of internet comments, websites, most pop art styles, troubleshooting detail, coding Q&A. Which is why any sane country would extend fair use to all of these things no questions asked, short of 1:1 replication. Yankistan however is not a sane country and I am expecting the outcome to these legal tests to be absolutely bonkers. >But they make money Yes, so does the guy who takes 20 public domain stories, publishes it as a collection on google books and sells it to me for 1 dollar. People act as if their models aren't hugely backed by human labor, labor that is hugely transformative and commands a decent reward.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Which is why any sane country would extend fair use to all of these things no questions asked, short of 1:1 replication. if that was all they wanted to scrape, I wouldn't mind that. Reddit et al. would have an issue, but they don't exactly compensate commenters to begin with either. But given that visual works are being copied and that they are being sued by NYT (who hired writers for over a century to produce what is now being scraped for free), it's clear that that wouldn't be enough. >so does the guy who takes 20 public domain stories, publishes it as a collection on google books and sells it to me for 1 dollar. curation is a lucrative business in the Information Era, so if there's no licensing issue I don't see the issue. I've spent days, weeks researching various problems and I'd happily pay a dollar for someone to collect a dozen good sources into one place to save me that time. If all of OpenAI's content was public domain, there would be no lawsuit.

thrill 3y ago

What makes humanity is copyrighted. Sure, let's create powerful thinking machines that understand nothing of modern society.

moogly 3y ago

So yet another one of those tech innovations with an absolutely broken business model only kept afloat by skirting the law. Got it.

_zephyr 3y ago

I do think OpenAI has a point in what they're saying: if we expect human-level competency of AI, it needs to be able to see and train on human-accessible content and ideally with a similar distribution. For example, I make an open source Firefox web extension for filtering internet content with my own classifier. That literally would not be able to exist without being able to be trained on web content, much of which is copyrighted. Requiring that I somehow either a) use only attributed data or b) detect and not use copyrighted content when trying to build something representative of my source distribution (e.g. the web) sounds like a recipe for a poor outcome. Now maybe my addon isn't your cup of tea - but what if you found out that the next generation of uBlock Origin etc. could not be as effective because of legislation because it wanted to use an AI model? Legislating too heavily around this area will, I believe, have a tremendous chilling effect for small businesses and open source folks trying to innovate in AI. I've also worked commercially in the creation of two closed source machine learning models, but the domains were restricted enough that web content was not a particularly helpful input. One did all right, and one did not. Seeing bets succeed and fail gives me appreciation for the long-term and uncertain bets that OpenAI has been making for ages finally coming to fruition. I think without businesses being willing to make those bets the GPU-hours would have been hard to pay for. I've wondered if potentially a different way out of this is not restricting the use of copyrighted material in the training process itself, but rather to instead only consider the created final works. Of course there are thorny problems there, too, but I don't see that having the same chilling effect on research and probably a lesser effect on business as well. One thing I think is clear though: we've reached a tipping point in the US similar to 1998 when the DMCA was legislated where the technology is forcing us to think carefully about what copyright means. So I have question for those on HN who have meaningfully worked in the creation of not just AI-generated content, but in the creation of some AI model that others use freely or commercially: what seem like promising paths forward here? Or to those working in copyright law (like @williamcotton): how do you see the status quo and potential paths forward?

hostyle 3y ago
> I do think OpenAI has a point in what they're saying: if we expect human-level competency of AI, it needs to be able to see and train on human-accessible content and ideally with a similar distribution. Any human who wants to access copyrighted works is by law required to honour the copyright - whether that means purchasing of licenses, timed rental access or immediate cease and desist of usage. Why should AI (and the billion-dollar-backed companies building them) get different treatment? Or to turn it the other way: if the billion-dollar-backed companies building AI models do get a free pass then surely humans should too?