8 ms·

Copyright was never conceived to apply to technology like this and the onslaught of copyright suits (like the NYT one) underscore its fundamental rent-seeking n

Copyright was never conceived to apply to technology like this and the onslaught of copyright suits (like the NYT one) underscore its fundamental rent-seeking nature. No doubt these latest changes to GPT-4 are in response to the suits they’re presently fighting. However these cases are ultimately resolved, the end-user will be the biggest loser.

gumballindie 3y ago
[flagged]
- huytersd 3y ago
  Your work is not free from derivation which is what GPT4 does in the overwhelming number of cases. If there are small outliers and it regurgitates something word for word, we can handle it like most other instances of copyright infringement as we do now. File a takedown notice and that particular phrase can be explicitly filtered out post output generation. Easy.
  - ketzo 3y ago
    I agree about the derivation bit, but “File a takedown notice for every NYT article ever published after proving GPT can reproduce each one” is not what I would call a clean solution. That’s basically a regulatory DDOS attack. Current copyright law is simply not equipped to handle LLMs, I think.
    - queuebert 3y ago
      I, for one, will enjoy watching lawyers and AI fight to the death.
      - huytersd 3y ago
        I already love AI too much to enjoy it.
    - heyoni 3y ago
      It’s what they do anyways. The file suit after takedown after DMCA and never ever hesitate to drag court cases out over months and years, wasting everybody’s time to make sure grandma pays up because someone in her house was using Napster.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Yeah, except I paid for the work i derived mine from. I paid taxes to learn in school, i paid for textbooks, i paid to see a painting, i paid to watch a movie, and i paid even to learn how to speak and do math. Stop stealing, and pay what you owe. Easy.
    - encomiast 3y ago
      Are you really suggesting that learning from watching others, going to library, taking in the public domain, etc. is a form a theft?
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    No, no one gets to get away with breaking the law over and over and over again with a simple "whoopsies" each time they get caught. There needs to be penalties.
    - huytersd 3y ago
      So YouTube should be shut down the first time a copyrighted work is uploaded to it?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- o11c 3y ago
  and more than that: even if we would agree that works should not be protected, we're currently in a highly-asymmetrical position where big players like Microsoft can take people's hard work but give nothing back. The only way to survive under a copyright regime is viral licensing.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  Physical property is a consequence of the laws of physics. If I have a gold coin in my hand, then you don't have that gold coin in your hand. If you want the coin then you can either trade for it or fight me, but either way only one of us can have the coin. Even a bird with a worm knows a concept of physical property. Copyright is something that was invented relatively recently, a few hundred years ago, because of a new technology back then: the printing press. Before the printing press there was no need for copyright. Now today we again have a new technology in neural networks, and it's entirely possible that the realities of this technology push us back in the other direction, undoing what the printing press did.
  - abathologist 3y ago
    > Physical property is a consequence of the laws of physics. If I have a gold coin in my hand, then you don't have that gold coin in your hand. So do you believe people should only be able to own real estate that they are currently physically occupying? By your reasoning, no one could ever own a piece of land larger than what they were currently standing or lying on. So no one could own land. So abolition of all property rights, essentially. I'm hella down for this, but then we should also be able to walk into the OpenAI offices and inspect their source code, cause that shit won't fit in any one hand afaik. This is incredibly naive misunderstanding of how property rights work: they are 100% a social and conceptual construct. IANAL, but I believe you are confusing property with possession. But, yeah. I'm down: no one can own anything that isn't currently in their hand. Let's go liberate a lot of fake property that is "owned" in violation of the laws of physics!
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    The world you describe is that which turned former communist countries in the underdeveloped entities they are today. By not respecting people’s right to own property you disincentivise them from adding value. The printing press analogy is relevant. Similar to how we made rules on how that tool can be used we now need rules in how to protect people’s creations from being taken away by force using ai. Physical property rules are not the result of “physics”. Are the result of evolving beyond the savagery of taking that which doesnt belong to you by force. If it wasnt protected by law it would be protected by the sword. I get that some people would prefer that type of living but by and large civilised humans dont.
- FactKnower69 3y ago
  >Corporate communism want to take that away contentless, thrashing drivel
  - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- colechristensen 3y ago
  Sure, for reasonable copyright terms. Currently, if you create something when you’re young and live long, a 150 year long copyright term is reasonably possible. (Life + 70 years) Much as I appreciate someone’s rights to their work, things should enter the public domain in something more like 10 to 20 years. Even then, copyright protections are too strong when in force. You published something so people would use it, your ability to limit how should be quite restricted to protecting you from folks selling it as their own. I am also in favor of forced standard licensing terms. Like say after five years there should be a standard streaming licensing fee for films and shows such that anyone can broadcast/stream/sell copies for a flat rate.
  - heyoni 3y ago
    We also have to consider the cost of enforcement. We can’t be soaking up millions and billions of taxpayer dollars to protect copyrights or field complaints that aim to protect mutated copies of said works…just like you don’t send a swat team to enforce parking tickets, we have to consider what is at loss for the New York Times or other copyright holders before clogging up the courts. There’s a reason lawyers are so quick to file a suit and it’s because it cost nothing to sic the dogs of the American justice system on others.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Kim Dotcom’s adventure calmed things down for the last wave of digital ip theft. Once that happens with one or two ai copyright disbelievers the rest will calm down.
      - heyoni 3y ago
        But is it really a problem if the AI is transmitting the information in its own words? And even if that is considered illegal, doesn’t it significantly diminish said crime?
        gumballindie 3y ago
- flir 3y ago
  You probably didn't mean to, but implying that's how the whole of humanity works is a bit out there. It's the local rules (geographically and temporally), sure. But rules can be changed.
Espressosaurus 3y ago
Because ChatGPT users are the only people that are worth considering.
BobbyTables2 3y ago
[dead]
naet 3y ago
The artist or author might end up being the loser, and the multi billion corporation harvesting their work might make an unearned profit off it. To me personally it's crazy how many people think that we would be better off without any kind of copyright protection. Copyright solves many real world problems and protects people against having a company profit off their work... but as soon as AI is involved so many people start to advocate for throwing it away.
- encomiast 3y ago
  I don't think most people believe we are better off without copyright. I think people believe that copyright protects specific concrete expressions and that fair use exists to allow others to build on ideas in transformative ways. It's not clear where building a learning model from this work sits in this context, hence the court cases. Also, it's a subtle difference, but copyright is not intended to solve the problem of companies profiting off of artist's works, it is intended to promote the progress of science and useful arts. It attempts to do this by giving creators limited exclusive rights.
  - sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
    How does locking away most of the knowledge, research and learning materials in the private vaults of a few publishing houses for their personal profit promote the progress of science I wonder? Even scientists are tired of the predatory and rent seeking behaviour of the publishers they have fallen prey to and are looking for any way out. This is not promoting progress this is the opposite of it
    - encomiast 3y ago
      I think it grossly mischaracterizes what copyright protects to describe is as "most of the knowledge, research and learning materials". Still I agree, that the extensions of copyright length and the behavior/incentives of publishers works against the original intent of copyright. Having said that, publishers only have control of copyright because authors give it to them. Copyright rests with the creator — the system where people are compelled to sign this over to publishers is a different (but of course related) problem. Scientists who are tired of the predatory behavior of publishers have other choices today. It's not clear what alternative you are proposing.
zx8080 3y ago
OpenAI is the force to cut slice from the copyright pie which the big copyright hoarders have. The hoarders will not strike back to try to kill the OpenAI business. Because in any case they will not be able to kill the technology itself. So, obviously, it's better for them to have OpenAI as a partner and share some profit with them to control the AI field than to kill this one and wait for another AI menace to raise. OpenAI is not the one who would kill a copyright. They just want their cut.
mortify 3y ago
The copyright issue seems unchanged. Anyone taking wholesale quotes from another entity is likely in violation of copyright law. If someone uses AI, and posts the output from it as their own work, and that work contains copyrighted material, the person who posted it is in violation of copyright. AI is just a tool they chose to use and they remain responsible for remaining in compliance with copyright law. What we need is a reasonable way for people using AI to determine which parts of the text or images they have are subject to copyright.
- __loam 3y ago
  Just a tool that required billions of dollars worth of copyrighted material to be created.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    How can you possibly argue that taking a bunch of text and creating an application that creates text isn't transformative? The tool itself unambiguously is fair use.
    - __loam 3y ago
      Whether something is transformative is one of 4 tests for fair use.
- tomp 3y ago
  > Anyone taking wholesale quotes from another entity is likely in violation of copyright law What do you mean anyone? Is Sony liable when you play an entire movie on their TV? Is Nuance liable when you use their Dragon screen reader to cerbalize an entire NYT article? Is Google liable when you display an entire webpage in Google Chrome? How about if you switch to Dark Mode, is that a transformative use? Why would AI be any different? It’s just a tool at the end of the day!
mvdtnz 3y ago
I'm sure you'd feel the same way if it was your life's work these systems were hoovering up and regurgitating.
teddyh 3y ago
The problem is people at large companies creating these AI models, wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it, but these large companies also want to keep copyright protection intact, for their regular business activities. They want to eat the cake and have it too. And they are arguing for essentially eliminating copyright for their specific purpose and convenience, when copyright has virtually never been loosened for the public’s convenience, even when the exceptions the public asks for are often minor and laudable. If these companies were to argue that copyright should be eliminated because of this new technology, I might not object. But now that they come and ask… no, they pretend to already have, a copyright exception for their specific use, I will happily turn around and use their own copyright maximalist arguments against them. (Copied from a comment of mine written over a year ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047>)
- kolinko 3y ago
  > these large companies also want to keep copyright protection intact, for their regular business activities Care to share an example? I didn't hear of OpenAI or anyone else arguing or trying to sue anyone for abusing the copyright. If anything, their business decisions rely on an assumption that copyright will not help them protect their work
  - misnome 3y ago
    Don't they have an explicit T&C that says you are not allowed to use their output for training other models?
    - kolinko 3y ago
      T&C yes, but not copyright.
  - bamboozled 3y ago
    Prime example for you right here: https://nypost.com/2023/12/18/business/openai-suspends-bytedances-account-after-it-allegedly-used-gpt-to-build-rival-ai-product-report/ https://nypost.com/2023/12/18/business/openai-suspends-byted... 100% pure unadulterated hypocrisy from "OpenAI".
theonemind 3y ago
People generate all of the data going into the system and then the middle-men (OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Big Tech middle-man of the week) reap a disproportinate centralized benefit. That causes a bigger problem than the so-called rent-seeking behavior of copyright holders in this case, as this has the net effect of leveraging human creativity, etc. to devalue it and continue the erosion of the middle class. Bad things happen when you let middlemen get the upper hand, like the American health care system, or big finance disconnected from the real economy. I'll vote against the middleman every time in favor of the original value creator, because society goes down the toliet when middlemen win.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  Yes, when I read "rent-seeking" i assume OP meant OpenAI. Google search at least was just a link to content we wrote. OpenAI just steals it.
  - __loam 3y ago
    OP was obviously referring to the copyright holders whose data he feels so entitled to.
- verisimi 3y ago
  Yes. If you think about it, the individual is being subjected to a man in the middle attack, cleaving a creator from their creation via the use of consent agreements for providing a platform. Rent seeking.
- hyperhopper 3y ago
  What is the alternative though? I agree with the feelings and sentiments of the anti-ai people that want it to pay copyright, but I never hear any considerations for what comes next. This is going to end up being the music industry all over again. It's going to be impossible for any individuals or small companies to get the rights needed, and instead were going to get massive content labels selling the rights, or only giant corporations being able to hop through all these new hoops. We don't want a repeat of that as a society, creating yet another leeching middleman and horrible industry favoring only the incumbents.
ssss11 3y ago
The data is not the technology.
bluescrn 3y ago
Why should 'big tech' corporations be allowed to use AI to remix/mash-up human-generated content all of a sudden when creative individuals have generally been prohibited from doing it for so long?
- mlrtime 3y ago
  Wow, I didn't know creative individuals have been banned from remixing copywrited material in their own private works. We must tell the millions of kids who doodle characters in their notebooks that this prohibited.

gumballindie 3y ago

[flagged]

huytersd 3y ago
Your work is not free from derivation which is what GPT4 does in the overwhelming number of cases. If there are small outliers and it regurgitates something word for word, we can handle it like most other instances of copyright infringement as we do now. File a takedown notice and that particular phrase can be explicitly filtered out post output generation. Easy.
- ketzo 3y ago
  I agree about the derivation bit, but “File a takedown notice for every NYT article ever published after proving GPT can reproduce each one” is not what I would call a clean solution. That’s basically a regulatory DDOS attack. Current copyright law is simply not equipped to handle LLMs, I think.
  - queuebert 3y ago
    I, for one, will enjoy watching lawyers and AI fight to the death.
    - huytersd 3y ago
      I already love AI too much to enjoy it.
  - heyoni 3y ago
    It’s what they do anyways. The file suit after takedown after DMCA and never ever hesitate to drag court cases out over months and years, wasting everybody’s time to make sure grandma pays up because someone in her house was using Napster.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Yeah, except I paid for the work i derived mine from. I paid taxes to learn in school, i paid for textbooks, i paid to see a painting, i paid to watch a movie, and i paid even to learn how to speak and do math. Stop stealing, and pay what you owe. Easy.
  - encomiast 3y ago
    Are you really suggesting that learning from watching others, going to library, taking in the public domain, etc. is a form a theft?
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  No, no one gets to get away with breaking the law over and over and over again with a simple "whoopsies" each time they get caught. There needs to be penalties.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    So YouTube should be shut down the first time a copyrighted work is uploaded to it?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
o11c 3y ago
and more than that: even if we would agree that works should not be protected, we're currently in a highly-asymmetrical position where big players like Microsoft can take people's hard work but give nothing back. The only way to survive under a copyright regime is viral licensing.
zarzavat 3y ago
Physical property is a consequence of the laws of physics. If I have a gold coin in my hand, then you don't have that gold coin in your hand. If you want the coin then you can either trade for it or fight me, but either way only one of us can have the coin. Even a bird with a worm knows a concept of physical property. Copyright is something that was invented relatively recently, a few hundred years ago, because of a new technology back then: the printing press. Before the printing press there was no need for copyright. Now today we again have a new technology in neural networks, and it's entirely possible that the realities of this technology push us back in the other direction, undoing what the printing press did.
- abathologist 3y ago
  > Physical property is a consequence of the laws of physics. If I have a gold coin in my hand, then you don't have that gold coin in your hand. So do you believe people should only be able to own real estate that they are currently physically occupying? By your reasoning, no one could ever own a piece of land larger than what they were currently standing or lying on. So no one could own land. So abolition of all property rights, essentially. I'm hella down for this, but then we should also be able to walk into the OpenAI offices and inspect their source code, cause that shit won't fit in any one hand afaik. This is incredibly naive misunderstanding of how property rights work: they are 100% a social and conceptual construct. IANAL, but I believe you are confusing property with possession. But, yeah. I'm down: no one can own anything that isn't currently in their hand. Let's go liberate a lot of fake property that is "owned" in violation of the laws of physics!
- gumballindie 3y ago
  The world you describe is that which turned former communist countries in the underdeveloped entities they are today. By not respecting people’s right to own property you disincentivise them from adding value. The printing press analogy is relevant. Similar to how we made rules on how that tool can be used we now need rules in how to protect people’s creations from being taken away by force using ai. Physical property rules are not the result of “physics”. Are the result of evolving beyond the savagery of taking that which doesnt belong to you by force. If it wasnt protected by law it would be protected by the sword. I get that some people would prefer that type of living but by and large civilised humans dont.
FactKnower69 3y ago
>Corporate communism want to take that away contentless, thrashing drivel
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
colechristensen 3y ago
Sure, for reasonable copyright terms. Currently, if you create something when you’re young and live long, a 150 year long copyright term is reasonably possible. (Life + 70 years) Much as I appreciate someone’s rights to their work, things should enter the public domain in something more like 10 to 20 years. Even then, copyright protections are too strong when in force. You published something so people would use it, your ability to limit how should be quite restricted to protecting you from folks selling it as their own. I am also in favor of forced standard licensing terms. Like say after five years there should be a standard streaming licensing fee for films and shows such that anyone can broadcast/stream/sell copies for a flat rate.
- heyoni 3y ago
  We also have to consider the cost of enforcement. We can’t be soaking up millions and billions of taxpayer dollars to protect copyrights or field complaints that aim to protect mutated copies of said works…just like you don’t send a swat team to enforce parking tickets, we have to consider what is at loss for the New York Times or other copyright holders before clogging up the courts. There’s a reason lawyers are so quick to file a suit and it’s because it cost nothing to sic the dogs of the American justice system on others.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Kim Dotcom’s adventure calmed things down for the last wave of digital ip theft. Once that happens with one or two ai copyright disbelievers the rest will calm down.
    - heyoni 3y ago
      But is it really a problem if the AI is transmitting the information in its own words? And even if that is considered illegal, doesn’t it significantly diminish said crime?
      - gumballindie 3y ago
flir 3y ago
You probably didn't mean to, but implying that's how the whole of humanity works is a bit out there. It's the local rules (geographically and temporally), sure. But rules can be changed.

Espressosaurus 3y ago

Because ChatGPT users are the only people that are worth considering.

BobbyTables2 3y ago

[dead]

naet 3y ago

The artist or author might end up being the loser, and the multi billion corporation harvesting their work might make an unearned profit off it. To me personally it's crazy how many people think that we would be better off without any kind of copyright protection. Copyright solves many real world problems and protects people against having a company profit off their work... but as soon as AI is involved so many people start to advocate for throwing it away.

encomiast 3y ago
I don't think most people believe we are better off without copyright. I think people believe that copyright protects specific concrete expressions and that fair use exists to allow others to build on ideas in transformative ways. It's not clear where building a learning model from this work sits in this context, hence the court cases. Also, it's a subtle difference, but copyright is not intended to solve the problem of companies profiting off of artist's works, it is intended to promote the progress of science and useful arts. It attempts to do this by giving creators limited exclusive rights.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
  How does locking away most of the knowledge, research and learning materials in the private vaults of a few publishing houses for their personal profit promote the progress of science I wonder? Even scientists are tired of the predatory and rent seeking behaviour of the publishers they have fallen prey to and are looking for any way out. This is not promoting progress this is the opposite of it
  - encomiast 3y ago
    I think it grossly mischaracterizes what copyright protects to describe is as "most of the knowledge, research and learning materials". Still I agree, that the extensions of copyright length and the behavior/incentives of publishers works against the original intent of copyright. Having said that, publishers only have control of copyright because authors give it to them. Copyright rests with the creator — the system where people are compelled to sign this over to publishers is a different (but of course related) problem. Scientists who are tired of the predatory behavior of publishers have other choices today. It's not clear what alternative you are proposing.

zx8080 3y ago

OpenAI is the force to cut slice from the copyright pie which the big copyright hoarders have. The hoarders will not strike back to try to kill the OpenAI business. Because in any case they will not be able to kill the technology itself. So, obviously, it's better for them to have OpenAI as a partner and share some profit with them to control the AI field than to kill this one and wait for another AI menace to raise. OpenAI is not the one who would kill a copyright. They just want their cut.

mortify 3y ago

The copyright issue seems unchanged. Anyone taking wholesale quotes from another entity is likely in violation of copyright law. If someone uses AI, and posts the output from it as their own work, and that work contains copyrighted material, the person who posted it is in violation of copyright. AI is just a tool they chose to use and they remain responsible for remaining in compliance with copyright law. What we need is a reasonable way for people using AI to determine which parts of the text or images they have are subject to copyright.

__loam 3y ago
Just a tool that required billions of dollars worth of copyrighted material to be created.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  How can you possibly argue that taking a bunch of text and creating an application that creates text isn't transformative? The tool itself unambiguously is fair use.
  - __loam 3y ago
    Whether something is transformative is one of 4 tests for fair use.
tomp 3y ago
> Anyone taking wholesale quotes from another entity is likely in violation of copyright law What do you mean anyone? Is Sony liable when you play an entire movie on their TV? Is Nuance liable when you use their Dragon screen reader to cerbalize an entire NYT article? Is Google liable when you display an entire webpage in Google Chrome? How about if you switch to Dark Mode, is that a transformative use? Why would AI be any different? It’s just a tool at the end of the day!

mvdtnz 3y ago

I'm sure you'd feel the same way if it was your life's work these systems were hoovering up and regurgitating.

teddyh 3y ago

The problem is people at large companies creating these AI models, wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it, but these large companies also want to keep copyright protection intact, for their regular business activities. They want to eat the cake and have it too. And they are arguing for essentially eliminating copyright for their specific purpose and convenience, when copyright has virtually never been loosened for the public’s convenience, even when the exceptions the public asks for are often minor and laudable. If these companies were to argue that copyright should be eliminated because of this new technology, I might not object. But now that they come and ask… no, they pretend to already have, a copyright exception for their specific use, I will happily turn around and use their own copyright maximalist arguments against them. (Copied from a comment of mine written over a year ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047>)

kolinko 3y ago
> these large companies also want to keep copyright protection intact, for their regular business activities Care to share an example? I didn't hear of OpenAI or anyone else arguing or trying to sue anyone for abusing the copyright. If anything, their business decisions rely on an assumption that copyright will not help them protect their work
- misnome 3y ago
  Don't they have an explicit T&C that says you are not allowed to use their output for training other models?
  - kolinko 3y ago
    T&C yes, but not copyright.
- bamboozled 3y ago
  Prime example for you right here: https://nypost.com/2023/12/18/business/openai-suspends-bytedances-account-after-it-allegedly-used-gpt-to-build-rival-ai-product-report/ https://nypost.com/2023/12/18/business/openai-suspends-byted... 100% pure unadulterated hypocrisy from "OpenAI".

theonemind 3y ago

People generate all of the data going into the system and then the middle-men (OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Big Tech middle-man of the week) reap a disproportinate centralized benefit. That causes a bigger problem than the so-called rent-seeking behavior of copyright holders in this case, as this has the net effect of leveraging human creativity, etc. to devalue it and continue the erosion of the middle class. Bad things happen when you let middlemen get the upper hand, like the American health care system, or big finance disconnected from the real economy. I'll vote against the middleman every time in favor of the original value creator, because society goes down the toliet when middlemen win.

mjburgess 3y ago
Yes, when I read "rent-seeking" i assume OP meant OpenAI. Google search at least was just a link to content we wrote. OpenAI just steals it.
- __loam 3y ago
  OP was obviously referring to the copyright holders whose data he feels so entitled to.
verisimi 3y ago
Yes. If you think about it, the individual is being subjected to a man in the middle attack, cleaving a creator from their creation via the use of consent agreements for providing a platform. Rent seeking.
hyperhopper 3y ago
What is the alternative though? I agree with the feelings and sentiments of the anti-ai people that want it to pay copyright, but I never hear any considerations for what comes next. This is going to end up being the music industry all over again. It's going to be impossible for any individuals or small companies to get the rights needed, and instead were going to get massive content labels selling the rights, or only giant corporations being able to hop through all these new hoops. We don't want a repeat of that as a society, creating yet another leeching middleman and horrible industry favoring only the incumbents.

ssss11 3y ago

The data is not the technology.

bluescrn 3y ago

Why should 'big tech' corporations be allowed to use AI to remix/mash-up human-generated content all of a sudden when creative individuals have generally been prohibited from doing it for so long?

mlrtime 3y ago
Wow, I didn't know creative individuals have been banned from remixing copywrited material in their own private works. We must tell the millions of kids who doodle characters in their notebooks that this prohibited.