7 ms·

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

by 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."

by zgs 3y ago

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."