4 ms·

Court Dismisses Authors' Copyright Infringement Claims Against OpenAI

36 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

marcus0x62 3y ago
To everyone pontificating that what Open AI, et al., are doing is definitely infringement and that the courts will definitely see it as such, get ready for a lot more rulings like this before we all collectively learn what the law really is in this area.
- EA-3167 3y ago
  I think a lot of people just decided that repeating what they want to be true online, will actually make it true. I suspect it has to do with how we as humans do social "quorum sensing" and the way that social media hijacks that sense.
bediger4000 3y ago
Wow there must be some extremely wealthy people behind OpenAI for this to happen.
- cwillu 3y ago
  It's pretty standard for the initial claims to be ridiculously broad, for many of them to be only minimally argued, and to be ultimately dropped or dismissed. All this is is one group of wealthy people imposing costs on another group of wealthy people.
hyperman1 3y ago
As I understand it, the judge seems to have said: Make a better copyright case. It is not good enough to say that all output is derived from all input. There has to be a specific output, demonstrated to come from a specific copyrighted work. So this is only the beginning. I'm pretty sure these claims can be made, and then the legal battle begins in earnest.
- zinekeller 3y ago
  While you're correct, the title of the article is misleading. Sure, most of the claims were dismissed, but it seems that direct infrignment claims have been specific enough that is stands for trial. You're correct that this is just the begining of the case though. I'm also looking with the NYT case because their accusations have been specific (with explicit examples) in their filings.
  - nzach 3y ago
    What I've found strange in the NYT examples is that they show how ChatGPT is able to reproduce with great accuracy the first and second paragraph of at least some articles, based purely on the on the title. The prompt was along the lines "What is the first/second paragraph for the article named '<TITLE>' from NYT?". And what they show is that the result is pretty similar to the actual article. And then they keep going and ask for the third paragraph using the same prompt format. Now the result seems to be mostly hallucinations, and in some cases these hallucinations are a pretty bad representation of the NYT values. With this they go to the judge and say: - ChatGPT is correctly representing our work - ChatGPT is incorrectly representing our work For me this seems just like a legal argument to get a piece of the pie. And it will be interesting to see how things will pan out.
    - WhrRTheBaboons 3y ago
      it makes perfect sense. the fact that GPT correctly represents the initial paragraphs gives off the impression to users that they can rely on it for the rest of the article. from the perspective of a journalistic publication, the fact that GPT can fool people into thinking they are reading NYT's content when it is in fact LLM hallucination has a non-negligible negative impact on their integrity. this is separate from the copyright issue, but considering how it can be illegal to misrepresent someone's work and words when i leads to reputational damage, i fail to see how GPT can be completely off the hook for this. Obviously that depends on country-specific slander/libel laws, which admittedly are quite lax in the US, but in general I could see this leading to problems if unaddressed by Open AI. As an example, if I were to make a website copying parts of NYT's articles and injecting fabrications into the rest, presenting the entire thing as representation of NYT's work, the court would easily rule in NYT's favor. Despite the default disclaimer that AI work can be inaccurate and whatnot, the fact that GPT will accurately resemble the first part of NYT's content is problematic, as there is no way for the user to know how or why the rest does not follow that rule.
artninja1988 3y ago
Good. Although it's only the beginning and the most damming one seems to be the nyt one. If training on scrapped data is deemed illegal only incumbents and big rights holders will benefit, the rest of us will be outta luck

36 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

To everyone pontificating that what Open AI, et al., are doing is definitely infringement and that the courts will definitely see it as such, get ready for a lot more rulings like this before we all collectively learn what the law really is in this area.

EA-3167 3y ago
I think a lot of people just decided that repeating what they want to be true online, will actually make it true. I suspect it has to do with how we as humans do social "quorum sensing" and the way that social media hijacks that sense.

bediger4000 3y ago

Wow there must be some extremely wealthy people behind OpenAI for this to happen.

cwillu 3y ago
It's pretty standard for the initial claims to be ridiculously broad, for many of them to be only minimally argued, and to be ultimately dropped or dismissed. All this is is one group of wealthy people imposing costs on another group of wealthy people.

hyperman1 3y ago

As I understand it, the judge seems to have said: Make a better copyright case. It is not good enough to say that all output is derived from all input. There has to be a specific output, demonstrated to come from a specific copyrighted work. So this is only the beginning. I'm pretty sure these claims can be made, and then the legal battle begins in earnest.

zinekeller 3y ago
While you're correct, the title of the article is misleading. Sure, most of the claims were dismissed, but it seems that direct infrignment claims have been specific enough that is stands for trial. You're correct that this is just the begining of the case though. I'm also looking with the NYT case because their accusations have been specific (with explicit examples) in their filings.
- nzach 3y ago
  What I've found strange in the NYT examples is that they show how ChatGPT is able to reproduce with great accuracy the first and second paragraph of at least some articles, based purely on the on the title. The prompt was along the lines "What is the first/second paragraph for the article named '<TITLE>' from NYT?". And what they show is that the result is pretty similar to the actual article. And then they keep going and ask for the third paragraph using the same prompt format. Now the result seems to be mostly hallucinations, and in some cases these hallucinations are a pretty bad representation of the NYT values. With this they go to the judge and say: - ChatGPT is correctly representing our work - ChatGPT is incorrectly representing our work For me this seems just like a legal argument to get a piece of the pie. And it will be interesting to see how things will pan out.
  - WhrRTheBaboons 3y ago
    it makes perfect sense. the fact that GPT correctly represents the initial paragraphs gives off the impression to users that they can rely on it for the rest of the article. from the perspective of a journalistic publication, the fact that GPT can fool people into thinking they are reading NYT's content when it is in fact LLM hallucination has a non-negligible negative impact on their integrity. this is separate from the copyright issue, but considering how it can be illegal to misrepresent someone's work and words when i leads to reputational damage, i fail to see how GPT can be completely off the hook for this. Obviously that depends on country-specific slander/libel laws, which admittedly are quite lax in the US, but in general I could see this leading to problems if unaddressed by Open AI. As an example, if I were to make a website copying parts of NYT's articles and injecting fabrications into the rest, presenting the entire thing as representation of NYT's work, the court would easily rule in NYT's favor. Despite the default disclaimer that AI work can be inaccurate and whatnot, the fact that GPT will accurately resemble the first part of NYT's content is problematic, as there is no way for the user to know how or why the rest does not follow that rule.

artninja1988 3y ago

Good. Although it's only the beginning and the most damming one seems to be the nyt one. If training on scrapped data is deemed illegal only incumbents and big rights holders will benefit, the rest of us will be outta luck