7 ms·

The best approach to circumventing the nondisclosure agreement is for the affected employees to get together, write out everything they want to say about OpenAI

The best approach to circumventing the nondisclosure agreement is for the affected employees to get together, write out everything they want to say about OpenAI, train an LLM on that text, and then release it. Based on these companies' arguments that copyrighted material is not actually reproduced by these models, and that any seemingly-infringing use is the responsibility of the user of the model rather than those who produced it, anyone could freely generate an infinite number of high-truthiness OpenAI anecdotes, freshly laundered by the inference engine, that couldn't be used against the original authors without OpenAI invalidating their own legal stance with respect to their own models.

rlt 2y ago
This would be hilarious and genius. Touché.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bboygravity 2y ago
Genious. I'm praying for this to happen.
judge2020 2y ago
NDAs don’t touch the copyright of your speech / written works you produce after leaving, they just make it breach of contract to distribute those words.
- elicksaur 2y ago
  Following the legal defense of these companies, the employees wouldn’t be distributing any words. They’re distributing a model.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    They’re disseminating the information. Form isn’t as important as it is for copyright.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    Please just stop. It’s highly unlikely that any relevant part of any reasonably structured NDA has any material relevance to copyright. Why do developers think that they can just intuit this stuff? This is one step away from being a more trendy “stick the constitution to the back of my car in lieu of a license place” lunacy.
    - elicksaur 2y ago
      Actually, I’m a licensed attorney having some fun exploring tongue-in-cheek legal arguments on the internet. But, I could also be a dog.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  Technically, no words are being distributed here. (At least according to OpenAI lawyers.)
- romwell 2y ago
  >they just make it breach of contract to distribute those words. See, they aren't distributing the words, and good luck proving that any specific words went into training the model.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Clever, but no. The argument about LLMs not being copyright laundromats making sense hinges the scale and non-specificity of training. There's a difference between "LLM reproduced this piece of copyrighted work because it memorized it from being fed literally half the internet", vs. "LLM was intentionally trained to specifically reproduce variants of this particular work". Whatever one's stances on the former case, the latter case would be plain infringing copyrights and admitting to it. In other words: GPT-4 gets to get away with occasionally spitting out something real verbatim. Llama2-7b-finetune-NYTArticles does not.
- romwell 2y ago
  Cool, just feed the ChatGPT+ the same half the Internet plus OpenAI founders' anecdotes about the company. Ta-da.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    And be rightfully sacked for maliciously burning millions of dollars on a retrain to purposefully poison the model? Not to mention: LLMs aren't oracles. Whatever they say will be dismissed as hallucinations if it isn't corroborated by other sources.
    - romwell 2y ago
      >And be rightfully sacked for maliciously burning millions of dollars on a retrain to purposefully poison the model? Does it really take millions dollars of compute to add additional training data to an existing model? Plus, we're talking about employees that are leaving / left anyway. >Not to mention: LLMs aren't oracles. Whatever they say will be dismissed as hallucinations if it isn't corroborated by other sources. Excellent. That means plausible deniability. Surely all those horror stories about unethical behavior are just hallucinations, no matter how specific they are. Absolutely no reason for anyone to take them seriously. Which is why the press will not hesitate to run with that, with appropriate disclaimers, of course. Seriously, you seem to think that in a world where numbers about death toll in Gaza are taken verbatim from Hamas without being corroborated by other sources, an AI model output will not pass the test of public scrutiny? Very optimistic of you.
otterley 2y ago
IAAL (but not your lawyer and this is not legal advice). That’s not how it works. It doesn’t matter if you write the words yourself or have an agent write them for you. In either case, it’s the communication of the covered information that is proscribed by these kinds of agreements.
visarga 2y ago
No need for LLM, anonymous letter does the same thing
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  On first blush, this sounds like a good idea. Thinking deeper, the company is so small that it will be easy to identify the author.
Always42 2y ago
if I slaved away at openai for a year to get some equity, I don't think I would want to be the one to try this strategy
renewiltord 2y ago
To be honest, you can just say “I don’t have anything to add on that subject” and people will get the impression. No one ever says that about companies they like so you know when people shut down that something was up. “What was the company culture like?” “Etc. platitude so on and so forth” “And I heard the CEO was a total dickbag. Was that your experience working with him?” “I don’t have anything to add on that subject” Of course going back and forth on that won’t really work but to different people you can’t be expected to not say the nice things and then someone could build up a story based on that.
jahewson 2y ago
Ha ha, but no. For starters, copyright falls under federal law and contacts under state law, so it’s not even possible to make this claim in the relevant court.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
KoolKat23 2y ago
Lol this would be a great performative piece. Although not so sure it'd stand up to scrutiny. Openai could probably take them to court on the grounds of disclosure of trade secrets or something like that and force them to reveal its training data and thus potentially revealing its source.
- nextaccountic 2y ago
  If they did so, they would open up themselves for lawsuits of people unhappy about OpenAI's own training data. So they probably won't.
  - KoolKat23 2y ago
    Good point
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
NDA's don't rely on copyright to protect the party who drafted it from disclosure. There might even be an argument to be made that training the LLM on it was disclosure, regardless of whether you release the LLM publicly or not. We all work in tech right? Why do even you people get intellectual property so wrong, every single time?
andyjohnson0 2y ago
Clever, but the law is not a machine or an algorithm. Intent matters. Training an LLM with the intent of contravening an NDA is just plain <intent to contravene an NDA>. Everyone would still get sued anyway.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jeffreygoesto 2y ago
  But then training a commercial model is done with the intent to not pay the original authors, how is that different?
  - kdnvk 2y ago
    It’s not done with the intent to infringe copyright.
    - binkethy 2y ago
      It would appear that it explicitly IS done with this intent. We are told that an LLM is a living being that merely learns and then creates, but yet we are aware that its outputs regurgitate combinations of uta inputs.
  - repeekad 2y ago
    > done with the intent to not pay the original authors no one building this software wants to “steal from creators” and the legal precedent for using copyrighted works for the purpose of training is clear with the NYT case against open AI It’s why things like the recent deal with Reddit to train on their data (which Reddit owns and users give up when using the platform) are becoming so important, same with Twitter/X
    - kaoD 2y ago
      > no one building this software wants to “steal from creators” > It’s why things like the recent deal[s ...] are becoming so important Sorry but I don't follow. Is it one or the other? If they didn't want to steal from the original authors, why do they not-steal Reddit now? What happens with the smaller creators that are not Reddit? When is OpenAI meeting with me to discuss compensation? To me your post felt something like "I'm not robbing you, Small State Without Defense that I just invaded, I just want to have your petroleum, but I'm paying Big State for theirs cause they can kick my ass". Aren't the recent deals actually implying that everything so far has actually been done with the intent of not compensating their source data creators? If that was not the case, they wouldn't need any deals now, they'd just continue happily doing whatever they've been doing which is oh so clearly lawful. What did I miss?
p0w3n3d 2y ago
that's the evilest thing I can imagine - fighting with them with their own weapon
b112 2y ago
Copyright != an NDA. Copyright is not an agreement between two entities, but a US federal law, with international obligations both ratified and not. Copyright has fair uses clauses, endless court decisions limiting its use, carve outs for libraries, additional junk like the DMCA and more slapped on top. It's a patchwork of dozens of treaties and laws, spanning hundreds of years. For example, you can read a book to a room full of kids, you can use copyright materials in comedic skits, you can quote snippets, the list goes on. And again, this is all legislated. The point? It's complex, and specific usage of copyrighted works infringing or not, can be debatable without intent immediately being malign. Meanwhile, an NDA covers far, far more than copyright. It may cover discussion and disclosure of everything or anything, including even client lists, trade secrets, work processes, and more. It is signed, and agreed to by both parties involved. Equating "copyright law" to "an NDA" is a non-starter. There's literally zero legal parallel or comparison here. And as others have mentioned, the intent of the act would be malicious on top of all of this. I know a lot of people dislike the whole data snag by OpenAI, and have moral or ethical objections to closed models, but thinking anyone would care about this argument if you breach an NDA is a bad idea. No judge would even remotely accept or listen to such chicanery.
cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
I’m going to break rank from everyone else and explicitly say “not clever”. Developers that think that they know how the levels system works are a dime a dozen. It’s both easy and useless to take some acquired-in-passing largely incorrect surface level understanding of a legal mechanic and “pwned with facts and logic!” in whichever way benefits you.
deleted 2y ago
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aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

rlt 2y ago

This would be hilarious and genius. Touché.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bboygravity 2y ago

Genious. I'm praying for this to happen.

judge2020 2y ago

NDAs don’t touch the copyright of your speech / written works you produce after leaving, they just make it breach of contract to distribute those words.

elicksaur 2y ago
Following the legal defense of these companies, the employees wouldn’t be distributing any words. They’re distributing a model.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  They’re disseminating the information. Form isn’t as important as it is for copyright.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  Please just stop. It’s highly unlikely that any relevant part of any reasonably structured NDA has any material relevance to copyright. Why do developers think that they can just intuit this stuff? This is one step away from being a more trendy “stick the constitution to the back of my car in lieu of a license place” lunacy.
  - elicksaur 2y ago
    Actually, I’m a licensed attorney having some fun exploring tongue-in-cheek legal arguments on the internet. But, I could also be a dog.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
otabdeveloper4 2y ago
Technically, no words are being distributed here. (At least according to OpenAI lawyers.)
romwell 2y ago
>they just make it breach of contract to distribute those words. See, they aren't distributing the words, and good luck proving that any specific words went into training the model.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

Clever, but no. The argument about LLMs not being copyright laundromats making sense hinges the scale and non-specificity of training. There's a difference between "LLM reproduced this piece of copyrighted work because it memorized it from being fed literally half the internet", vs. "LLM was intentionally trained to specifically reproduce variants of this particular work". Whatever one's stances on the former case, the latter case would be plain infringing copyrights and admitting to it. In other words: GPT-4 gets to get away with occasionally spitting out something real verbatim. Llama2-7b-finetune-NYTArticles does not.

romwell 2y ago
Cool, just feed the ChatGPT+ the same half the Internet plus OpenAI founders' anecdotes about the company. Ta-da.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  And be rightfully sacked for maliciously burning millions of dollars on a retrain to purposefully poison the model? Not to mention: LLMs aren't oracles. Whatever they say will be dismissed as hallucinations if it isn't corroborated by other sources.
  - romwell 2y ago
    >And be rightfully sacked for maliciously burning millions of dollars on a retrain to purposefully poison the model? Does it really take millions dollars of compute to add additional training data to an existing model? Plus, we're talking about employees that are leaving / left anyway. >Not to mention: LLMs aren't oracles. Whatever they say will be dismissed as hallucinations if it isn't corroborated by other sources. Excellent. That means plausible deniability. Surely all those horror stories about unethical behavior are just hallucinations, no matter how specific they are. Absolutely no reason for anyone to take them seriously. Which is why the press will not hesitate to run with that, with appropriate disclaimers, of course. Seriously, you seem to think that in a world where numbers about death toll in Gaza are taken verbatim from Hamas without being corroborated by other sources, an AI model output will not pass the test of public scrutiny? Very optimistic of you.

otterley 2y ago

IAAL (but not your lawyer and this is not legal advice). That’s not how it works. It doesn’t matter if you write the words yourself or have an agent write them for you. In either case, it’s the communication of the covered information that is proscribed by these kinds of agreements.

visarga 2y ago

No need for LLM, anonymous letter does the same thing

throwaway2037 2y ago
On first blush, this sounds like a good idea. Thinking deeper, the company is so small that it will be easy to identify the author.

Always42 2y ago

if I slaved away at openai for a year to get some equity, I don't think I would want to be the one to try this strategy

renewiltord 2y ago

To be honest, you can just say “I don’t have anything to add on that subject” and people will get the impression. No one ever says that about companies they like so you know when people shut down that something was up. “What was the company culture like?” “Etc. platitude so on and so forth” “And I heard the CEO was a total dickbag. Was that your experience working with him?” “I don’t have anything to add on that subject” Of course going back and forth on that won’t really work but to different people you can’t be expected to not say the nice things and then someone could build up a story based on that.

jahewson 2y ago

Ha ha, but no. For starters, copyright falls under federal law and contacts under state law, so it’s not even possible to make this claim in the relevant court.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

KoolKat23 2y ago

Lol this would be a great performative piece. Although not so sure it'd stand up to scrutiny. Openai could probably take them to court on the grounds of disclosure of trade secrets or something like that and force them to reveal its training data and thus potentially revealing its source.

nextaccountic 2y ago
If they did so, they would open up themselves for lawsuits of people unhappy about OpenAI's own training data. So they probably won't.
- KoolKat23 2y ago
  Good point

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

NDA's don't rely on copyright to protect the party who drafted it from disclosure. There might even be an argument to be made that training the LLM on it was disclosure, regardless of whether you release the LLM publicly or not. We all work in tech right? Why do even you people get intellectual property so wrong, every single time?

andyjohnson0 2y ago

Clever, but the law is not a machine or an algorithm. Intent matters. Training an LLM with the intent of contravening an NDA is just plain <intent to contravene an NDA>. Everyone would still get sued anyway.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jeffreygoesto 2y ago
But then training a commercial model is done with the intent to not pay the original authors, how is that different?
- kdnvk 2y ago
  It’s not done with the intent to infringe copyright.
  - binkethy 2y ago
    It would appear that it explicitly IS done with this intent. We are told that an LLM is a living being that merely learns and then creates, but yet we are aware that its outputs regurgitate combinations of uta inputs.
- repeekad 2y ago
  > done with the intent to not pay the original authors no one building this software wants to “steal from creators” and the legal precedent for using copyrighted works for the purpose of training is clear with the NYT case against open AI It’s why things like the recent deal with Reddit to train on their data (which Reddit owns and users give up when using the platform) are becoming so important, same with Twitter/X
  - kaoD 2y ago
    > no one building this software wants to “steal from creators” > It’s why things like the recent deal[s ...] are becoming so important Sorry but I don't follow. Is it one or the other? If they didn't want to steal from the original authors, why do they not-steal Reddit now? What happens with the smaller creators that are not Reddit? When is OpenAI meeting with me to discuss compensation? To me your post felt something like "I'm not robbing you, Small State Without Defense that I just invaded, I just want to have your petroleum, but I'm paying Big State for theirs cause they can kick my ass". Aren't the recent deals actually implying that everything so far has actually been done with the intent of not compensating their source data creators? If that was not the case, they wouldn't need any deals now, they'd just continue happily doing whatever they've been doing which is oh so clearly lawful. What did I miss?

p0w3n3d 2y ago

that's the evilest thing I can imagine - fighting with them with their own weapon

b112 2y ago

Copyright != an NDA. Copyright is not an agreement between two entities, but a US federal law, with international obligations both ratified and not. Copyright has fair uses clauses, endless court decisions limiting its use, carve outs for libraries, additional junk like the DMCA and more slapped on top. It's a patchwork of dozens of treaties and laws, spanning hundreds of years. For example, you can read a book to a room full of kids, you can use copyright materials in comedic skits, you can quote snippets, the list goes on. And again, this is all legislated. The point? It's complex, and specific usage of copyrighted works infringing or not, can be debatable without intent immediately being malign. Meanwhile, an NDA covers far, far more than copyright. It may cover discussion and disclosure of everything or anything, including even client lists, trade secrets, work processes, and more. It is signed, and agreed to by both parties involved. Equating "copyright law" to "an NDA" is a non-starter. There's literally zero legal parallel or comparison here. And as others have mentioned, the intent of the act would be malicious on top of all of this. I know a lot of people dislike the whole data snag by OpenAI, and have moral or ethical objections to closed models, but thinking anyone would care about this argument if you breach an NDA is a bad idea. No judge would even remotely accept or listen to such chicanery.

cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago

I’m going to break rank from everyone else and explicitly say “not clever”. Developers that think that they know how the levels system works are a dime a dozen. It’s both easy and useless to take some acquired-in-passing largely incorrect surface level understanding of a legal mechanic and “pwned with facts and logic!” in whichever way benefits you.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]