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OpenAI: 'The New York Times Paid Someone to Hack Us'
- rvz 3y agoSo the best excuse from a multi-billion dollar non-profit that was caught red handed by the NYT are now unfounded conspiracy theories. A new nadir in the great multi-billion AI content grift.
- misnome 3y ago“Hack” > by using deceptive prompts
- stuckinhell 3y agoExtremely unethical behavior by the New York Times if true
- doytch 3y agoIf I’m reading the complaint correctly, the “hack” is what amounts to…prompt injection? Are we seriously considering that a hack these days? Genuine question.
- nuc1e0n 3y agoSo by using ChatGPT at all you can be considered as hacking at OpenAI's discretion? You can't make this kind of absurdity up. Were OpenAI hacking when they scraped the whole internet?
- shrubble 3y agoAren't there 1000s of people on Twitter doing this for free, so they can do a screencap and share it?
- tananaev 3y agoI think the main point of the article is that they had to do some serious prompt engineering to get the results they wanted. It probably means that with normal usage it doesn't produce any quotes from copyrighted materials.
- asadotzler 3y agonormal usage doesn't come into play here. if the model contains verbatim text owned by the NYT, how that was demonstrated in immaterial to it's theft. You don't get to steal from me, lock up my propery inside you safe, and when I pop your safe (non-destructively) claim I'm cheating by showing the cops my shit inside your popped safe.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoThe model doesn’t contain verbatim text, the huge prompt might (tailored for each query), that’s the whole point of LLMs right?
- 15457345234 3y agoDefine 'contain' If I can reliably recite verbatim a 10 page short story then I 'contain' it even though you can't dissect my brain and find it. If a LLM can reliably and repeatably recite an article verbatim then it 'contains' it even if you can't run 'strings' on the weights and find it. Disagree? You might, but the court's opinion is what matters, and I think they'll go with the 'touch and feel' judgement not the 'bits and bytes' judgement.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoAgain, if you feed the article into the prompt over multiple queries, why would the model not regurgitate it? It doesn’t have to be in the model, you are basically giving the article to your chat session. The analogy holds, and I don’t think the court is going to be ignorant enough to fall for that trick.
- tylerrobinson 3y agoA snarky reply to your genuine question, but I suppose if “prompt engineering” is “engineering” then “prompt hacking” is “hacking” :)
- Fnoord 3y agoI like the fruit analogy: New fruits are discovered/invented. An apple is fruit, but a fruit is not necessarily an apple. When new fruits are discovered, the average definition (or perception of that definition) of fruit is also modified.
- keenmaster 3y agoIt’s beating loose slander with less loose slander. Seems fair game to me: “ OpenAI believes that it took tens of thousands of attempts to get ChatGPT to produce the controversial output that’s the basis of this lawsuit. This is not how normal people interact with its service, it notes.” I think the substance of OpenAI’s complaint is valid - think of the word “hacking” as clickbait to the real heart of the matter which is that New York Times went to obscene lengths to reproduce meaningful amounts of article text and, by withholding their methodology, misrepresented the behavior of OpenAI’s product. There are much easier ways to get NYT content for free than making tens of thousands of attempts to reproduce an NYT article while violating OpenAI terms of service and repeatedly ignoring GPT’s refusals to an insane* degree. *not normal insane, insane to the 10th power
- eigenket 3y agoWhat OpenAI claimes here does not seem to be true. Here is an article where ars technica tried it https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/ny-times-sues-open-ai-microsoft-over-copyright-infringement/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/ny-times-sues-op... And this is a screenshot of their session with copilot https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Screen-Shot-2023-12-27-at-12.11.54-PM.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Scree...
- keenmaster 3y agoArs tried and failed to reproduce the text, and then assumed that OpenAI closed a loophole when in fact they may have changed nothing - it’s just that NYT hired a team of experts to make tens of thousands of attempts to break the normal behavior of the model, while Ars didn’t: “ ChatGPT has apparently closed that loophole in between the preparation of that suit and the present. We entered some of the prompts shown in the suit, and were advised "I recommend checking The New York Times website or other reputable sources," although we can't rule out that context provided prior to that prompt could produce copyrighted material.” If I tried to do what NYT did, I would: - give up after a few attempts - get worried that I’m going to be banned from using OpenAI (a rational concern, because it doesn’t take a lot to get banned) - doubt the veracity of any “reproduced” text that I may receive The equilibrium here is for OpenAI to suggest signing up for NYT and providing a signup link if it detects interest in doing so.
- paxys 3y agoIt isn't about what we consider a hack, but what a 70 year old judge who asks his grandkids to help set up his iPhone considers a hack.
- brigadier132 3y agoIt's about what the law as defined by congress considers a hack.
- etiam 3y agoNot that I've read the background materials for that legislation, but what I'd expect is the law as such doesn't have very specific considerations for that, and the implementation for arbitrating the details is not too far removed from what paxys just described?
- silverquiet 3y agoThis trope feels quite out of touch these days. My dad is 70 and brought home a 486 when I was a single-digit age, and I distinctly remember him telling me not to tell my mom how much he paid for a 28.8K modem. The people who were key in building our modern tech were Boomers, and a 60 year old person today was born on the edge of Boomer/Gen X.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoIt’s out of touch because you provided an exception? I don’t think that’s how tropes work.
- silverquiet 3y agoIt’s out of touch because the take itself is 30 years old. The people who could get away with never touching a computer for their work are mostly dead already.
- arp242 3y agoThis blatant ageism is ridiculous. 60 year olds are just as capable of understanding that words in English can mean more than one thing. Someone 60 today was 20 in 1984, when small "home computers" were already widespread. Stallman is 70. Larry Wall is 69. Guido van Rossum is 68. Eric S. Raymond is 66. That young student Linus Torvalds is 54.
- eviks 3y agoNot in the nefarious way implied in this context, but otherwise yes, making the app bend to your will against how the devs want it to behave is part of a broad "hacking" category
- TulliusCicero 3y agoMore accurate title: "The New York Times Paid Someone To Use Weird Prompts In Our Product" Oh no! Anyway...
- a1o 3y ago"Open" AI and "hack".
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- sgt101 3y agoWell, if the Judge agrees with this there goes the rule of law in the USA. Their thesis is that it's illegal to investigate criminal behaviour. That seems like a very bad sort of thing to accept to me.
- 9question1 3y ago"And even then, they had to feed the tool portions of the very articles they sought to elicit verbatim passages of, virtually all of which already appear on multiple public websites." Getting OpenAI to spit out part of the prompt you provided in its output, and then claiming that it had been trained on that, seems dishonest. It shouldn't be illegal, but it also shouldn't be the basis of a successful lawsuit unless there's other context missing here.
- pavon 3y agoThey passed in a few sentences of an article and then ChatGPT reproduced the rest of the article. OpenAI's PR on this issue has been extremely misleading and this "hack" claim is just a continuation of that.
- eigenket 3y agoWhat OpenAI claimes here does not seem to be true. Here is an article where ars technica tried it https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/ny-times-sues-open-ai-microsoft-over-copyright-infringement/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/ny-times-sues-op... And this is a screenshot of their session with copilot https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Screen-Shot-2023-12-27-at-12.11.54-PM.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Scree...
- klik99 3y ago"Hack" is defined as "using deceptive prompts" which is a very misleading use of the word - using creative prompts is absolutely how people use ChatGPT, even if it isn't "expected behaviour". There is zero evidence that AI isn't leaky and that there will always be a way of returning the original corpus. Even if it takes a thousand tries, that means one out of thousand users would get it. This is probably the only good point in their rebuttal: that NYT "had to feed the tool portions of the very articles they sought to elicit verbatim passages". That being said, this is probably the first case that will determine the future of AI so staking a strong, extreme rebuttal is how the system should work, and the courts will decide the truth. It's going to be very interesting to see how this case progresses. Preemptive Edit: "Truth" might not be the best word, but rather how this should be seen in context of copyright law. It's very unclear how AI will legally be allowed to operate since corpuses commonly include copyrighted material - this is a question, due to how US law is structured, that HAS to be litigated in court for a clear answer. Just because you don't like OpenAIs argument, and I don't, this is how the legal system is designed to work. Edit 2: I feel many people are missing the point here (which I buried in the second paragraph, my bad) - This isn't some catty PR fight between NYT and OpenAI - this is the first major case about how LLMs/deep learning/etc fits in relation to copyright. This isn't about what is morally right, this is about do LLMs violate copyright law. NYT has made a strong case that it does violate copyright. OpenAI has some good and bad arguments (IMO 1 very good argument and the rest weak or bad) but they should be throwing their best arguments at the wall since that is how law works in the US. This won't be the last, but this is probably the first important case in the future of LLMs.
- gokulkrishh09 3y ago[dead]
- stanleykm 3y agoWasnt this started because someone figured out you can ask chatgpt to repeat a phrase infinitely and it would dump out an nyt article or some other content verbatim?
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- DinaCoder99 3y ago> OpenAI has signed partnerships with other prominent news industry outlets including the Associated Press and Axel Springer Well that's horrifying news.... I hope this is in a data-processing capacity that's able to be independently validated and doesn't rely on the accuracy of its generated output. If only we could sue newsrooms for shoddy journalism!
- paxys 3y agoA 173 year old newspaper is fighting a hot new silicon valley tech company with "open" in its name, and one of them is claiming they got "hacked" because the other party entered some words in a text box on their website. Guess which one is which?
- Alifatisk 3y agoThis got to be one of the funniest comments so far
- vvvvvvvvvvvv 3y agoWait, the NYT just did due diligence on their lawsuits and saw if getting copyright material from the model is possible, what does openAI wants, for the NYT to try one prompt and then to stop trying? For all they know they had to try until getting a result to be sure.
- nottorp 3y agoThey've reached peak usefulness and are now starting the lawsuit business model? Patent trolling when?
- gfodor 3y agoLots of comments but nobody seems to be asking the obvious question: what kind of bug? If the "bug" is "we had a bad system prompt" ok then this is stupid. If the bug was "turns out if you pass a secret argument to a HTTP endpoint you can skip the system prompt" then this is a hack.
- iowemoretohim 3y agoPretty interesting to see how each commenter bias influences how they interpret this claim.
- eviks 3y ago> OpenAI believes that it took tens of thousands of attempts to get ChatGPT to produce the controversial output that’s the basis of this lawsuit. This is not how normal people interact with its service, it notes. When you have millions of customers, the thousands of attempts is a trivial number, and you'll have plenty of "abnormal" people interacting, but also plenty of "normal" people interacting "abnormally" , so that's a poor excuse
- nh23423fefe 3y agoThis doesn't make sense. 10m queries by a single person will be correlated. 1 query by 10m users won't be.
- eviks 3y agoPeople are social, you know, so this lack of correlation only exists outside of reality. In reality your "1 query" will be correlated with a tweet "use this link that pastes the prompt to read the NYT"