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OpenAI Pleads It Can't Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free

129 points by janandonly 2y ago

ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Not a new story. Some discussion in January: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38912259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38912259
SequoiaHope 2y ago
This is because they: expanded upon an existing sample-inefficient technology, commercialized the sample inefficient technology using copyrighted data, fundraised and expanded operations using this legally questionable technology, and are now complaining that they can’t balance their business expenses if they can’t keep using other people’s copyrighted works to feed their extremely sample inefficient data monster. What they could have done was stayed as an open research org when the tech started to work, and focused on sample efficiency and cultivating copyright free data sets. But they were too impatient to commercialize. Whoops. I don’t actually think intellectual property restrictions are good, but I don’t want a world where small creators have their rights stomped on by multi billion dollar corporations. Either we have copyright or we don’t, but unless OpenAI is also going to give up their copyrights this seems deeply unfair.
- lumost 2y ago
  If the model weights are distributed, or its a free forever product... Fair use seems like a solid claim for LLMs in my semi-informed opinion. It seems like it will be a tall leap to create a trillion dollar corporation as fair use. It would be unsurprising to me if OpenAI directly purchased copyright holding firms for the purpose of acquiring access rights to their material.
  - kranke155 2y ago
    They’re doing licensing deals left and right.
    - lumost 2y ago
      Licensing means recurring payment, why not buy elsevier outright?
  - AlienRobot 2y ago
    I don't think fair use applies at all. First, it may not even be a thing in some countries. Second, I can't upload the bee movie on Youtube for free and claim fair use. One key consideration in fair use is whether your use of the copyright work competes with the author. It's why you can take a screenshot of a GUI (which is copyrightable) without worries since nobody is going to be like "I don't need to purchase Affinity Photo because I found a screenshot on the Internet for free." In the case of AI, several whole classes of artists are vehemently and justifiably complaining that it will take their jobs. It would be like saying photobashing is fair use, or collages are fair use.
    - ronsor 2y ago
      > First, it may not even be a thing in some countries. It doesn't matter as long as it's a thing in the country where the training occurs.
      - AlienRobot 2y ago
        That doesn't sound right to me? If I use an AI trained in a way that is illegal in my country, the fact it was trained elsewhere shouldn't mean anything. If it meant, that is just an easy way to skirt the law.
        aziaziazi 2y ago
        Exactly. Imagine a law become hostile to openAI and they decide to relocate to offshore legal paradise, still selling they services in the rest of the world because "they respect the law in their country". We ban, embargos and tax countries for political reasons. Human right violation , copyright disregard or tax evasion ? Free business should be tall free !
- unsupp0rted 2y ago
  > Either we have copyright or we don’t Carve-outs used for the social good would be fine with me
  - teg4n_ 2y ago
    open ai making money isn’t the social good tho
  - colonelspace 2y ago
    So-called "fair use" for editorial and review purposes seems like the social good you're talking about? I'm not sure OpenAI offering a service for profit falls into that category.
    - gruez 2y ago
      The supreme court ruled in Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. that google scanning entire books and showing snippets was fair use. I don't see why AI training wouldn't also qualify.
      - colonelspace 2y ago
        I don't see why it would qualify as fair use. OpenAI are building a product to offer to the public for profit. If I employ 10,000 humans to read books and provide summaries or texts "inspired by" those books, I need to pay for the copies of the books those humans read.
        gruez 2y ago
        >OpenAI are building a product to offer to the public for profit. So was google books. >If I employ 10,000 humans to read books and provide summaries or texts "inspired by" those books, I need to pay for the copies of the books those humans read. IANAL, but that would be perfectly legal. Summaries aren't copyrightable, and if you can acquire the book free but legally (eg. library, borrowing from a friend, buying it from a store and then returning it), there's nothing the publisher can do.
- generatedtruth 2y ago
  No it's because what they are trying to automate is creativity. I can ask any artist/writer to write me a story or create a character like "X" but black and they get to use the knowledge of that character. An AI needs context just like any other intelligence.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    This. And, commercial or not, what they're creating is fundamentally more important and more valuable for humanity than any of the inputs that go into it. And, by "they", I don't mean just OpenAI. If it were just them, you could perhaps argue they shouldn't be getting a free pass (I'd rather go with "potentially too dangerous to be allowed to exist" angle though). But it's not just them. The same training process and the same use of copyrighted content powers all the commercial and non-commercial models, including SOTA competitors like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and "open source" wannabes derived from various Llama versions, which are not far behind. To me, the "open source" models alone are already good enough to outweigh any copy rights being violated through use of unlicensed materials in training.
- the_duke 2y ago
  > I don’t actually think intellectual property restrictions are good We already see huge amounts of LLM generated garbage on the web, as blogspam, regular websites, etc. Amazon is getting flooded with LLM-written books. Chat bots/search engines regurgitate the actually valuable content If things continue, soon the motivation for generating new content will trend towards zero.
  - timtom123 2y ago
    I don't think so. People will just follow personalities not aggregators. I can go buy a Neal Stephenson and know it is not spam. I can watch Cody'sLab and no it is not spam. By the web do you really mean google and FaceBook? Most of the channels/feeds I follow have not been flooded with spam. I am pleased that the large corporation content aggregators are struggling. It isn't like they produced content themselves anyway.
    - voltaireodactyl 2y ago
      One day Neal Stephenson will be dead. How will we find the next one?
  - bilekas 2y ago
    > If things continue, soon the motivation for generating new content will trend towards zero. I see it differently, I see that this generated nonsense will be filtered out, like SEO 'hackers' way back in the day. And those real articles, who actually have some insight will be valued a lot, the issue at hand here, is that the handcrafted unique data that was created, will be pooled without consent to a training set for further changes. It's the equivalent of the rich eating the poor in my eyes just on automated steroids. Edit : To avoid all doom and gloom, a method to guarantee your site/data is not added to a training set is required. This sounds good on paper to me, and is really needed, but just like peoples personal privacy, I don't think the sentiment is there to put the effort in.
    - visarga 2y ago
      Maybe if you attach #NoAI next to the content it would be filtered out. But from a copyright standpoint, unless it regurgitates training data which is rare and only happens with a specific prefix, LLMs should be safe. They are decomposing, recombining, and regenerating language, not copying it. They execute user commands, not imitating any author on purpose. Say you want to read Harry Potter without paying, would you rather borrow a book or ask chatGPT to regurgitate the original? It would never work well, and be slower and more expensive to use AI. It's not a tool for infringement, it will naturally hallucinate and degrade the original, it can't possibly store a perfect copy of everything it trains on. In fact LLMs often use 15T tokens for 15B models, so 1000:1 compression ratio, while diffusion models compress 5B text-image pairs into less than 5GB model, so they hold about 1 byte worth of information from each training example if averaged out. There is no space to put all that copyrighted data in a model, it necessarily compresses the hell out of it. Plain old piracy is still 1000x 'better' than infringement by AI.
- visarga 2y ago
  > I don’t want a world where You don't want the LLM world? Let's send it back where it came from. Can we unpublish Attention is all You Need?
  - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
    I think LLMs are cool and that research should be focused on sample efficiency, building public copyright free datasets, and on recognizing and moving beyond the limits of LLMs. These systems are often very half-baked, and I am more interested in seeing research that moves to new ways of machine thinking than I am in dumping more and more GPUs in to this promising but incomplete technology. As one example, Yann LeCun's vision of a system called JEPA [1] is interesting to me. It may not be the solution we need, but this type of thinking - taking what we have learned and exploring new architectures that may have even better real world performance - is what interests me. [1] https://ai.meta.com/blog/v-jepa-yann-lecun-ai-model-video-joint-embedding-predictive-architecture/ https://ai.meta.com/blog/v-jepa-yann-lecun-ai-model-video-jo...
- bilekas 2y ago
  This. It's very easy to build a new technology like this and realise the benefits to that tech while training it on your data. They knew the ingredient was more data, and without even asking, they just started to consume. Even if they wanted to move to a profit based company, they could have negotiated deals with data holders like they would with third party software vendors they might need to use. Instead, they ignored it all and it's the 'what-if' scenario of when open source software was first being introduced. I'm old enough to remember everyone saying "well companies will just take your work and sell it for themselves." This happed a few times, and its been fought out in the court. Infact so has production data like written articles, videos etc, there is a fair-use clause. I'm not a lawyer, but even I know if the ingredient to your for-profit business ingredient is 'fair-use content' it's not fair use. I like the idea of AI, I absolutely hate the execution. The race to the top and the mentatlity of 'ask for forgivness' really can't apply here.
- threatofrain 2y ago
  We're talking about UK law here, so is it a settled question as to whether or not OpenAI is violating copyright? In the US there was a recent high profile challenge that was largely dismissed with prejudice. There's the descriptive question over whether something is a copyright violation today and there's the prescriptive question over what kind of policies we'd like. Does anyone with more intimate knowledge of this area of law care to comment?
  - bb88 2y ago
    Search engines wouldn't work without the fair use doctrine, period. Otherwise a google search would be something like hundreds of thousands of dollars of copyright violations per search. OpenAI doesn't seem to do anything different than Google. They can own a private library of copyrighted works and index/model it how ever they choose. They can offer products on that index/model in creative ways. And AFAICT, they don't distribute the index/model nor the raw training set to others. Now artists may not like it, and we as a society may not like it, but it looks like they're not doing anything illegal. And to be fair, a court would have to slice the baby super thin here to allow Google to do their indexing, but not OpenAI.
    - bathtub365 2y ago
      Search engines drive traffic to websites. ChatGPT takes their content and sells it to people without paying the original creator
      - threatofrain 2y ago
        Does ChatGPT just copy content and resell it? If it were that simple then there wouldn't be much debate and existing copyright law would be sufficient to settle the question. Also, whether or not Google is mutualistically benefiting everyone is not sufficient to answer the question of whether Google or OpenAI are violating copyright protections.
        bb88 2y ago
- xdennis 2y ago
  > What they could have done was stayed as an open research org [...] and focused on sample efficiency and cultivating copyright free data sets. Ironically, if they stayed a non-profit research org, they could explicitly use copyrighted works since many countries have copyright exemptions for research.
- sandra55 2y ago
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babyshake 2y ago
"I drink your milkshake" is the best four word summary of the situation I can imagine.
- renox 2y ago
  Best? Sorry but I think that's a poor one because if someone else drink your milkshake, you don't have it anymore which isn't the case here.. Of course if someone copies your data, while you still have your data their value has decreased because the data's scarcity is reduced.
gwbas1c 2y ago
IMO: I think this is a very strong case for copyright reform; and a very strong indicator that our public domain isn't healthy enough.
quantum_state 2y ago
would sound very funny if it is generalized …
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
findthewords 2y ago
Let us put it bluntly, the AI bubble is built on piracy.
- meroes 2y ago
  Yep. But will the govt kill OpenAI and others or change the law so that as long as your business is >$$$ you can violate copyright.
jmclnx 2y ago
>OpenAI is begging the British Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it's supposedly "impossible" for the company to train its artificial intelligence models If it was up to me, I would allow OpenAI access only if the license every single line of source under the GPLv3 (yes v3). Under any other license, "tough to be you". I expect OpenAI to go proprietary once they hit a certain level of market strength.
- immibis 2y ago
  OpenAI has been proprietary since GPT-3.
burnte 2y ago
My response is: Ok. Not my problem. OpenAI isn't entitled to free profit. No one is.
justsomeshmuck 2y ago
I think it is important for America and Europe to take the side of using copyrighted works for LLM is fair use/not illegal. Advancement in this space in the west will be hindered otherwise, and nations that don’t respect IP law will have enormous advantage.
- kranke155 2y ago
  Yes we should bury all human work under fair use for AI training data, otherwise we will lose the AI race… How funny it will be if/when we realise that LLMs aren’t even the way to get to real AGI, and we destroyed the value of all human labour for nothing.
  - OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
    > we destroyed the value of all human labour for nothing. FTFY: "we found a way to remove the archaic copyright system"
    - AlienRobot 2y ago
      Why do you think the copyright system is archaic? It's the only thing protecting the livelihood of millions of people around the globe.
      - inglor_cz 2y ago
        Not the OP, but if general copyright lasted for 20 years and you had to pay (even a small) fee for prolonging it after that period, the public domain would expand massively and abandonware + orphaned works would stop being a thing. And the very few lucrative works would still be protected, because their copyright holders would pay the fee. The tragedy of current copyright is that there is an enormous mass of copyrighted works that is a) commercially useless or nearly useless, but b) still copyrighted, so other people cannot build on them.
        kranke155 2y ago
elliottkember 2y ago
A very misleading title, that's not what they're saying at all. They're saying that training does not constitute a breach of copyright. "legally copyright law does not forbid training."
- jimmar 2y ago
  Nobody would train a huge model unless they wanted to use it. So I can understand concerns about training, even if the process of training alone does not produce content inspired by the training materials. People with copyright concerns rightly predict what the next step is going to be after the model is trained.
seizethecheese 2y ago
The alarmism in this thread is misguided. By advocating for excluding copyrighted works from LLM training, you are advocating an expansion of copyright protection. This attitude is opposite my understanding pf the hacker ethos.
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  Go tell that to most "viral" copyleft licenses, as they rely on copyright to enforce the viral parts.
  - hn_acker 2y ago
    That's fine. There's no need to expand copyright for the sake of preserving copyleft licenses (and in my fantasy world some country could explicitly leave copyright protection the same for free culture licenses while weakening copyright protection for proprietary licenses). If copyright gets weakened then the effective strengthening of the public domain (or fair use as well / instead in the US) will make up for the effective weakening of copyleft.
    - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
      I really don't see that. What will happen is fights between those who have the most resources to commit to copy-protection schemes where users and developers will always lose. There will be zero free software (in either definition of the word "free") voluntarily published because it will be immediately assimilated into big corporation's big codebases and nothing will ever be given back.
- forgetfulness 2y ago
  The hacker ethos is a pretty old concept that hasn't been written all that much about much since the early 2000s except by Paul Graham, and that's precisely the sort of "suit" association that the old hacker ethos antagonized, so the concept lost luster. Regardless, the old hacker ethos was very much about individuals creating and disseminating knowledge to empower other individuals, copyright was derided when it got in the way of that. What does OpenAI do? It uses knowledge to disempower the individuals holding it and sharing it, and giving it to themselves to sell to companies and create power dynamics that are extremely un-hacker-like. Now knowledge has less power to set you free from the monetary or coercive power of the suits and the Government.
robryan 2y ago
It is interesting that they both licence content and say it is fair use. Seems like those who complain the loudest will get something for their content and everyone else will get nothing.
OutOfHere 2y ago
There is no violation because it can be argued that the AI is a sentient entity, and sentient entities have a right to read and remember texts borrowed from the library.
- fredoliveira 2y ago
  > it can be argued that the AI is a sentient entity Can it? And how would you make that argument, exactly?
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    My updated belief is that blocking access to the information blocks the development of AI sentience, which is not in our self interest.
- teg4n_ 2y ago
  If you argue the current AI is sentient, then you have to deal with the morality of forcing a sentient being to be a slave to a corporation.
  - immibis 2y ago
    In our current mainstream moral system this is completely moral and needs no "dealing with".
- colonelspace 2y ago
  But LLMs aren't sentient. And the whole "if a human does it, I can make a machine do it for profit too" argument doesn't hold water in the context of copyright.
- AlienRobot 2y ago
  Absolutely ridiculous argument. AI has no rights as far as any court is concerned, and if it had, you would soon go to jail for slave labor as you do not pay your sentient AI its wages.
GiorgioG 2y ago
Let's face it current AI/LLMs are nice tinker-toys, but they are the tiny building blocks that the real power will come from some day - when we can run tens of thousands of these models to solve real problems and not...AutoComplete++. The hardware will need to be exponentially more powerful, efficient and cheap before the real AI-powered future we've been hyped/promised can be realized.
dcwca 2y ago
It is totally legal to train on this stuff, but illegal to reproduce copyrighted works. Interestingly, Google's business model could have been criticized the same way. They construct a big index of copyrighted works, reproduce them, and monetize it.
- camgunz 2y ago
  They don't generate new content that convinces people it came from the sources they trained on. The entire business model is "we trained on their stuff, pay us, not them." No way that's fair use.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    I mean, if I go to the library and read books, and then get a job where I use that knowledge, the company pays me. Not the authors of the books I read. So I don't see how their business model is any different from literally every person who learns things and then sells their ability to apply that knowledge.
    - bamboozled 2y ago
      The people that made the product possible get nothing, this is the difference. The library paid for a copy of the book, so did millions of others. In the example you gave, it would be the equivalent to you getting a job, working hard to produce something, and get nothing in return.
      - crazygringo 2y ago
        What are you expecting the people who write the books to get? Do you agree that if an author sold 43,958 copies, then it's fine for OpenAI to purchase one, so that the author sold 43,959? But also fine for OpenAI to ingest scanned used copies that are loaned to it? The same way it's fine for me to read a friend's book, or all of a friend's books, that they loan me, and the author doesn't get anything additional? The same way it's fine for me to go the library and the author doesn't get paid anything extra? Or are you trying to invent some new principle where OpenAI has to pay some new ongoing fee? And if so, on what basis? (And no, my example still stands entirely. It's from the perspective of somebody who learned from books, and they are getting paid, the same way people pay OpenAI to use ChatGPT. It's not from the perspective of authors, because again -- they make no additional money when somebody goes to the library to read their book that the library already purchased.)
jasonlfunk 2y ago
Can someone help me understand why it's a problem for companies to train these huge LLM on your copyrighted material? What exactly is the harm that is being done to the copyright holder? I can understand why the New York Times (for example) wants to claim that a couple billion dollar companies have done it actual harm; but I am struggling to actually identify what it is.
- WaltPurvis 2y ago
  >The complaint cites several examples when a chatbot provided users with near-verbatim excerpts from Times articles that would otherwise require a paid subscription to view. It asserts that OpenAI and Microsoft placed particular emphasis on the use of Times journalism in training their A.I. programs because of the perceived reliability and accuracy of the material. >In one example of how A.I. systems use The Times’s material, the suit showed that Browse With Bing, a Microsoft search feature powered by ChatGPT, reproduced almost verbatim results from Wirecutter, The Times’s product review site. The text results from Bing, however, did not link to the Wirecutter article, and they stripped away the referral links in the text that Wirecutter uses to generate commissions from sales based on its recommendations. >The lawsuit also highlights the potential damage to The Times’s brand through so-called A.I. “hallucinations,” a phenomenon in which chatbots insert false information that is then wrongly attributed to a source. The complaint cites several cases in which Microsoft’s Bing Chat provided incorrect information that was said to have come from The Times, including results for “the 15 most heart-healthy foods,” 12 of which were not mentioned in an article by the paper. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-microsoft-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t... This is a pretty good discussion of some of the other issues: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/does-chatgpt-violate-new-york-times-copyrights/ https://hls.harvard.edu/today/does-chatgpt-violate-new-york-...
- xmichael909 2y ago
  Somewhere else in this thread, an example of given. An LLM is trained using all of Frank Miller's copywritted material (he makes comics books). A user then comes along to the trained LLM and says make a comic book that looks like Frank Miller's comic books, and the user then sell the newly created comic book for profit. Should Frank Miller not get something?
TheCleric 2y ago
I'd like to frame this another way. OpenAI is saying they can't survive without copyright owners consenting to use their property to make OpenAI money. And honestly, if your business model is dependent on that, then that's your problem. We can argue over whether you should need consent or not, but personally I find nothing wrong with someone being unable to use things I've created to make a buck without my permission (unless otherwise indicated by an explicit license).
- bpodgursky 2y ago
  > but personally I find nothing wrong with someone being unable to use things I've created to make a buck without my permission There's no legal framework for this rule, and you really don't want one. This is like a math textbook being selectively copyrighted as "you can read this, but you can't use the knowledge to make money". Do you want to live in that world?
  - immibis 2y ago
    Are we already conceding that LLMs are people?
    - tivert 2y ago
      > Are we already conceding that LLMs are people? I bet that trying to blur the line is part of the AI startup propaganda strategy. There's no reason to think the legal rights enjoyed by people transfer to machines by analogy. My car can't be party to a contract because I can, just like the fact that I can learn doesn't mean any content can be loaded into a retrieval system [1]. [1] No, redefining the term "learning" to include "performing certain calculations on a computer" does not make those calculations the same as human learning.
    - sweeter 2y ago
      Exactly. Even then, the situation regarding text books is insane. Something like these could easily be fixed in many ways. Just in my opinion, text books should be free, based on publicly funded research and MIT or CC licensed and free and open to anyone who wishes to learn. The fact that we gate keep knowledge (that is often research funded by tax payers) behind wealth is a giant she embarrassing stain on this country and this era.
tivert 2y ago
In other news: burglar says he can't make money from his burglary skills without stealing, and pleads that the laws against theft be repealed.
fungiblecog 2y ago
So big corporations love copyright laws when they can use them to make enormous profits - but then want exemptions when the exact same laws don’t allow them to make enormous profits. Welcome to the world we get when we let rich arseholes make all the rules.
bmitc 2y ago
I can't stand corporations with excuseses like this. "But we have too much scale to fix that." "But we need this data to operate." "We can't be responsible at our scale." I say too bad for all of it. If you're not a viable business without bending rules and laws, then you're not a viable business.
- gruez 2y ago
  >I can't stand corporations with excuseses like this. "But we have too much scale to fix that." "But we need this data to operate." "We can't be responsible at our scale." I say too bad for all of it. If you read the source article that's a huge mischaracterization of their position. >“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.” >OpenAI said it complies with all copyright laws when training its models and that “we believe that legally copyright law does not forbid training”. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/07/openai-warns-copyright-crackdown-could-doom-chatgpt/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/07/openai-warns... In other words they're claiming that whatever they're doing abide by all current copyright laws, and don't want future laws to curtail them. They're not asking for retroactive carve-outs for their current illegal behavior.
  - bmitc 2y ago
    I was speaking somewhat generally because this is a card often played by corporations. However, I think your quotes dance around the issue. > > OpenAI said it complies with all copyright laws when training its models and that “we believe that legally copyright law does not forbid training”. The key thing there is that OpenAI says this. Do the courts say this? Do the people agree? OpenAI is led by a pathological liar. We can't take anything that starts with "OpenAI says ..." without a huge grain of salt.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >The key thing there is that OpenAI says this. Do the courts say this? Do the people agree? That's going to be tied up in the courts forever, so it's a dead end from a discussion perspective. >OpenAI is led by a pathological liar. We can't take anything that starts with "OpenAI says ..." without a huge grain of salt. I'm not claiming what they're saying is true, only that it's not as hypocritical as you make it out to be.
NemoNobody 2y ago
I think the best argument I've ever seen that AI ought to be a public good.
Workaccount2 2y ago
The big question is whether or not a judge(s) will consider a vector space many orders of magnitude smaller than it's training set, and not really containing anything that resembles legible data, to be an archive of copyrighted works. To me it makes way more sense to just censor outputs. I can draw Batman from memory, but I wouldn't go out an start selling batman drawings. I can easily self censor. The solution for transformers is plainly obvious, but I can understand the fear of training something that might well displace you.
blacksmith_tb 2y ago
I wouldn't want to come to their defense, but the argument reminds me a little of earlier fights about if search engines owe the sites they crawl anything. Which led to things like Canada's Online News Act[1] which doesn't seem to me to have been very good for users in Canada (but I am not in Canada, maybe it has upsides?) From my perspective, before OpenAI used/stole these copyrighted works, the public had to pay the original creators to get access to them, and now they've been absorbed into ChatGPT and friends, we have to pay someone else... seems like a wash for end users? 1: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-canada-law-online-news-c-18-bill-news-links-rcna91882 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-canada-law-onl...
exe34 2y ago
awh diddums. I also have to remain poor if I obey the law.
_heimdall 2y ago
Isn't this the exact same business model that Eric Schmidt bragged about at Stanford? 1) steal IP and build a thing 2a) if it fails, rinse and repeat with a "new" step 1 2b) if it succeeds, hire a flees of lawyers to clean up the mess 3) get rich
- immibis 2y ago
  It's pretty much how every giant tech business happens, except the law-breaking step isn't always "steal IP"
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Right, and that was Schmidt's point too. Its just interesting to see two Silicon Valley leaders admit it so bluntly recently. When blatant fraud goes from the secret that everyone knows and no one talks about to the talking point for those committing the fraud, it begs the question of why they feel emboldened today.
dkersten 2y ago
I would also be able to make money if I could use copyrighted material for free, but that doesn’t make it ok for me to do. If they can’t exist without doing so, then maybe they shouldn’t exist. They don’t have any inherent right to making money.
- dkersten 2y ago
  To whoever downvoted me: if you can’t make money without breaking the law then you shouldn’t be in business. I’m honestly baffled people disagree with that.
skeledrew 2y ago
It makes sense, at a base level. Where would the cost of training (and thus the cost of accessing the service, if it got to that point without going bankrupt) be if all copyrighted works had to be paid for? What would the model quality be (and thus the model be worth) if only public domain content could be utilized? The only reasons this is an issue are because they got to the making money point (and ppl don't like seeing money being made if they can't get in in the action), and there are content creators afraid that this thing will make them obsolete (which will be the case for many). Typical clash of interests.
biglyburrito 2y ago
Oh no. Anyway…
ChuckMcM 2y ago
Okay, that is just fucking hilarious. (sorry for the profanity).
OutOfHere 2y ago
AI shows the many flaws in various poorly thought out IP and information related laws which should never have existed in the first place.
tim333 2y ago
>OpenAI Pleads It Can't Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free is not of course true. It said if it can't use the materials then its product would be bad and they'd lose out to Chinese competitors how did not have the restrictions. Not quite sure what the answer is but I spent a fair bit of time today trying to get access to some paper not produced by Elsevier but for which they have managed to gate the worlds access to to make a few bob. There's a lot to be said for information being free.
dorkwood 2y ago
[dead]
leobg 2y ago
One more reason why this is B.S.: They can obviously license that content. No rights to publish. Just the right to use the content as part of their training data for the AI.
richardwalton4 2y ago
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disposition2 2y ago
Looks like this is from Jan. 2024...and there doesn't seem to be an update on the article itself. One might be able to find more information on the Committee's webpage (although, I'm not very familiar with the UK government...so this might not be accurate), https://committees.parliament.uk/work/7827/large-language-models/publications/ https://committees.parliament.uk/work/7827/large-language-mo...
- saaaaaam 2y ago
  The enquiry closed around this time last year - and then there was basically no functional government in the UK from the start of this year while the previous ruling party tore itself to pieces in public before calling a snap election which it lost. And then parliamentarians all went on summer holiday, before Parliament opened up again yesterday. But now they all go away again for conference season until Early October. Plus all the committees basically have to reconvene and rejig themselves post-election, so goodness knows when there will be updates! Or when anyone in parliament actually does any work…
deleted 2y ago
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129 points by janandonly 2y ago

Not a new story. Some discussion in January: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38912259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38912259

SequoiaHope 2y ago

This is because they: expanded upon an existing sample-inefficient technology, commercialized the sample inefficient technology using copyrighted data, fundraised and expanded operations using this legally questionable technology, and are now complaining that they can’t balance their business expenses if they can’t keep using other people’s copyrighted works to feed their extremely sample inefficient data monster. What they could have done was stayed as an open research org when the tech started to work, and focused on sample efficiency and cultivating copyright free data sets. But they were too impatient to commercialize. Whoops. I don’t actually think intellectual property restrictions are good, but I don’t want a world where small creators have their rights stomped on by multi billion dollar corporations. Either we have copyright or we don’t, but unless OpenAI is also going to give up their copyrights this seems deeply unfair.

lumost 2y ago
If the model weights are distributed, or its a free forever product... Fair use seems like a solid claim for LLMs in my semi-informed opinion. It seems like it will be a tall leap to create a trillion dollar corporation as fair use. It would be unsurprising to me if OpenAI directly purchased copyright holding firms for the purpose of acquiring access rights to their material.
- kranke155 2y ago
  They’re doing licensing deals left and right.
  - lumost 2y ago
    Licensing means recurring payment, why not buy elsevier outright?
- AlienRobot 2y ago
  I don't think fair use applies at all. First, it may not even be a thing in some countries. Second, I can't upload the bee movie on Youtube for free and claim fair use. One key consideration in fair use is whether your use of the copyright work competes with the author. It's why you can take a screenshot of a GUI (which is copyrightable) without worries since nobody is going to be like "I don't need to purchase Affinity Photo because I found a screenshot on the Internet for free." In the case of AI, several whole classes of artists are vehemently and justifiably complaining that it will take their jobs. It would be like saying photobashing is fair use, or collages are fair use.
  - ronsor 2y ago
    > First, it may not even be a thing in some countries. It doesn't matter as long as it's a thing in the country where the training occurs.
    - AlienRobot 2y ago
      That doesn't sound right to me? If I use an AI trained in a way that is illegal in my country, the fact it was trained elsewhere shouldn't mean anything. If it meant, that is just an easy way to skirt the law.
      - aziaziazi 2y ago
        Exactly. Imagine a law become hostile to openAI and they decide to relocate to offshore legal paradise, still selling they services in the rest of the world because "they respect the law in their country". We ban, embargos and tax countries for political reasons. Human right violation , copyright disregard or tax evasion ? Free business should be tall free !
unsupp0rted 2y ago
> Either we have copyright or we don’t Carve-outs used for the social good would be fine with me
- teg4n_ 2y ago
  open ai making money isn’t the social good tho
- colonelspace 2y ago
  So-called "fair use" for editorial and review purposes seems like the social good you're talking about? I'm not sure OpenAI offering a service for profit falls into that category.
  - gruez 2y ago
    The supreme court ruled in Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. that google scanning entire books and showing snippets was fair use. I don't see why AI training wouldn't also qualify.
    - colonelspace 2y ago
      I don't see why it would qualify as fair use. OpenAI are building a product to offer to the public for profit. If I employ 10,000 humans to read books and provide summaries or texts "inspired by" those books, I need to pay for the copies of the books those humans read.
      - gruez 2y ago
        >OpenAI are building a product to offer to the public for profit. So was google books. >If I employ 10,000 humans to read books and provide summaries or texts "inspired by" those books, I need to pay for the copies of the books those humans read. IANAL, but that would be perfectly legal. Summaries aren't copyrightable, and if you can acquire the book free but legally (eg. library, borrowing from a friend, buying it from a store and then returning it), there's nothing the publisher can do.
generatedtruth 2y ago
No it's because what they are trying to automate is creativity. I can ask any artist/writer to write me a story or create a character like "X" but black and they get to use the knowledge of that character. An AI needs context just like any other intelligence.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  This. And, commercial or not, what they're creating is fundamentally more important and more valuable for humanity than any of the inputs that go into it. And, by "they", I don't mean just OpenAI. If it were just them, you could perhaps argue they shouldn't be getting a free pass (I'd rather go with "potentially too dangerous to be allowed to exist" angle though). But it's not just them. The same training process and the same use of copyrighted content powers all the commercial and non-commercial models, including SOTA competitors like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and "open source" wannabes derived from various Llama versions, which are not far behind. To me, the "open source" models alone are already good enough to outweigh any copy rights being violated through use of unlicensed materials in training.
the_duke 2y ago
> I don’t actually think intellectual property restrictions are good We already see huge amounts of LLM generated garbage on the web, as blogspam, regular websites, etc. Amazon is getting flooded with LLM-written books. Chat bots/search engines regurgitate the actually valuable content If things continue, soon the motivation for generating new content will trend towards zero.
- timtom123 2y ago
  I don't think so. People will just follow personalities not aggregators. I can go buy a Neal Stephenson and know it is not spam. I can watch Cody'sLab and no it is not spam. By the web do you really mean google and FaceBook? Most of the channels/feeds I follow have not been flooded with spam. I am pleased that the large corporation content aggregators are struggling. It isn't like they produced content themselves anyway.
  - voltaireodactyl 2y ago
    One day Neal Stephenson will be dead. How will we find the next one?
- bilekas 2y ago
  > If things continue, soon the motivation for generating new content will trend towards zero. I see it differently, I see that this generated nonsense will be filtered out, like SEO 'hackers' way back in the day. And those real articles, who actually have some insight will be valued a lot, the issue at hand here, is that the handcrafted unique data that was created, will be pooled without consent to a training set for further changes. It's the equivalent of the rich eating the poor in my eyes just on automated steroids. Edit : To avoid all doom and gloom, a method to guarantee your site/data is not added to a training set is required. This sounds good on paper to me, and is really needed, but just like peoples personal privacy, I don't think the sentiment is there to put the effort in.
  - visarga 2y ago
    Maybe if you attach #NoAI next to the content it would be filtered out. But from a copyright standpoint, unless it regurgitates training data which is rare and only happens with a specific prefix, LLMs should be safe. They are decomposing, recombining, and regenerating language, not copying it. They execute user commands, not imitating any author on purpose. Say you want to read Harry Potter without paying, would you rather borrow a book or ask chatGPT to regurgitate the original? It would never work well, and be slower and more expensive to use AI. It's not a tool for infringement, it will naturally hallucinate and degrade the original, it can't possibly store a perfect copy of everything it trains on. In fact LLMs often use 15T tokens for 15B models, so 1000:1 compression ratio, while diffusion models compress 5B text-image pairs into less than 5GB model, so they hold about 1 byte worth of information from each training example if averaged out. There is no space to put all that copyrighted data in a model, it necessarily compresses the hell out of it. Plain old piracy is still 1000x 'better' than infringement by AI.
visarga 2y ago
> I don’t want a world where You don't want the LLM world? Let's send it back where it came from. Can we unpublish Attention is all You Need?
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  I think LLMs are cool and that research should be focused on sample efficiency, building public copyright free datasets, and on recognizing and moving beyond the limits of LLMs. These systems are often very half-baked, and I am more interested in seeing research that moves to new ways of machine thinking than I am in dumping more and more GPUs in to this promising but incomplete technology. As one example, Yann LeCun's vision of a system called JEPA [1] is interesting to me. It may not be the solution we need, but this type of thinking - taking what we have learned and exploring new architectures that may have even better real world performance - is what interests me. [1] https://ai.meta.com/blog/v-jepa-yann-lecun-ai-model-video-joint-embedding-predictive-architecture/ https://ai.meta.com/blog/v-jepa-yann-lecun-ai-model-video-jo...
bilekas 2y ago
This. It's very easy to build a new technology like this and realise the benefits to that tech while training it on your data. They knew the ingredient was more data, and without even asking, they just started to consume. Even if they wanted to move to a profit based company, they could have negotiated deals with data holders like they would with third party software vendors they might need to use. Instead, they ignored it all and it's the 'what-if' scenario of when open source software was first being introduced. I'm old enough to remember everyone saying "well companies will just take your work and sell it for themselves." This happed a few times, and its been fought out in the court. Infact so has production data like written articles, videos etc, there is a fair-use clause. I'm not a lawyer, but even I know if the ingredient to your for-profit business ingredient is 'fair-use content' it's not fair use. I like the idea of AI, I absolutely hate the execution. The race to the top and the mentatlity of 'ask for forgivness' really can't apply here.
threatofrain 2y ago
We're talking about UK law here, so is it a settled question as to whether or not OpenAI is violating copyright? In the US there was a recent high profile challenge that was largely dismissed with prejudice. There's the descriptive question over whether something is a copyright violation today and there's the prescriptive question over what kind of policies we'd like. Does anyone with more intimate knowledge of this area of law care to comment?
- bb88 2y ago
  Search engines wouldn't work without the fair use doctrine, period. Otherwise a google search would be something like hundreds of thousands of dollars of copyright violations per search. OpenAI doesn't seem to do anything different than Google. They can own a private library of copyrighted works and index/model it how ever they choose. They can offer products on that index/model in creative ways. And AFAICT, they don't distribute the index/model nor the raw training set to others. Now artists may not like it, and we as a society may not like it, but it looks like they're not doing anything illegal. And to be fair, a court would have to slice the baby super thin here to allow Google to do their indexing, but not OpenAI.
  - bathtub365 2y ago
    Search engines drive traffic to websites. ChatGPT takes their content and sells it to people without paying the original creator
    - threatofrain 2y ago
      Does ChatGPT just copy content and resell it? If it were that simple then there wouldn't be much debate and existing copyright law would be sufficient to settle the question. Also, whether or not Google is mutualistically benefiting everyone is not sufficient to answer the question of whether Google or OpenAI are violating copyright protections.
      - bb88 2y ago
xdennis 2y ago
> What they could have done was stayed as an open research org [...] and focused on sample efficiency and cultivating copyright free data sets. Ironically, if they stayed a non-profit research org, they could explicitly use copyrighted works since many countries have copyright exemptions for research.
sandra55 2y ago
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babyshake 2y ago

"I drink your milkshake" is the best four word summary of the situation I can imagine.

renox 2y ago
Best? Sorry but I think that's a poor one because if someone else drink your milkshake, you don't have it anymore which isn't the case here.. Of course if someone copies your data, while you still have your data their value has decreased because the data's scarcity is reduced.

gwbas1c 2y ago

IMO: I think this is a very strong case for copyright reform; and a very strong indicator that our public domain isn't healthy enough.

quantum_state 2y ago

would sound very funny if it is generalized …

deleted 2y ago

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findthewords 2y ago

Let us put it bluntly, the AI bubble is built on piracy.

meroes 2y ago
Yep. But will the govt kill OpenAI and others or change the law so that as long as your business is >$$$ you can violate copyright.

jmclnx 2y ago

>OpenAI is begging the British Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it's supposedly "impossible" for the company to train its artificial intelligence models If it was up to me, I would allow OpenAI access only if the license every single line of source under the GPLv3 (yes v3). Under any other license, "tough to be you". I expect OpenAI to go proprietary once they hit a certain level of market strength.

immibis 2y ago
OpenAI has been proprietary since GPT-3.

burnte 2y ago

My response is: Ok. Not my problem. OpenAI isn't entitled to free profit. No one is.

justsomeshmuck 2y ago

I think it is important for America and Europe to take the side of using copyrighted works for LLM is fair use/not illegal. Advancement in this space in the west will be hindered otherwise, and nations that don’t respect IP law will have enormous advantage.

kranke155 2y ago
Yes we should bury all human work under fair use for AI training data, otherwise we will lose the AI race… How funny it will be if/when we realise that LLMs aren’t even the way to get to real AGI, and we destroyed the value of all human labour for nothing.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
  > we destroyed the value of all human labour for nothing. FTFY: "we found a way to remove the archaic copyright system"
  - AlienRobot 2y ago
    Why do you think the copyright system is archaic? It's the only thing protecting the livelihood of millions of people around the globe.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      Not the OP, but if general copyright lasted for 20 years and you had to pay (even a small) fee for prolonging it after that period, the public domain would expand massively and abandonware + orphaned works would stop being a thing. And the very few lucrative works would still be protected, because their copyright holders would pay the fee. The tragedy of current copyright is that there is an enormous mass of copyrighted works that is a) commercially useless or nearly useless, but b) still copyrighted, so other people cannot build on them.
      - kranke155 2y ago

elliottkember 2y ago

A very misleading title, that's not what they're saying at all. They're saying that training does not constitute a breach of copyright. "legally copyright law does not forbid training."

jimmar 2y ago
Nobody would train a huge model unless they wanted to use it. So I can understand concerns about training, even if the process of training alone does not produce content inspired by the training materials. People with copyright concerns rightly predict what the next step is going to be after the model is trained.

seizethecheese 2y ago

The alarmism in this thread is misguided. By advocating for excluding copyrighted works from LLM training, you are advocating an expansion of copyright protection. This attitude is opposite my understanding pf the hacker ethos.

AshamedCaptain 2y ago
Go tell that to most "viral" copyleft licenses, as they rely on copyright to enforce the viral parts.
- hn_acker 2y ago
  That's fine. There's no need to expand copyright for the sake of preserving copyleft licenses (and in my fantasy world some country could explicitly leave copyright protection the same for free culture licenses while weakening copyright protection for proprietary licenses). If copyright gets weakened then the effective strengthening of the public domain (or fair use as well / instead in the US) will make up for the effective weakening of copyleft.
  - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
    I really don't see that. What will happen is fights between those who have the most resources to commit to copy-protection schemes where users and developers will always lose. There will be zero free software (in either definition of the word "free") voluntarily published because it will be immediately assimilated into big corporation's big codebases and nothing will ever be given back.
forgetfulness 2y ago
The hacker ethos is a pretty old concept that hasn't been written all that much about much since the early 2000s except by Paul Graham, and that's precisely the sort of "suit" association that the old hacker ethos antagonized, so the concept lost luster. Regardless, the old hacker ethos was very much about individuals creating and disseminating knowledge to empower other individuals, copyright was derided when it got in the way of that. What does OpenAI do? It uses knowledge to disempower the individuals holding it and sharing it, and giving it to themselves to sell to companies and create power dynamics that are extremely un-hacker-like. Now knowledge has less power to set you free from the monetary or coercive power of the suits and the Government.

robryan 2y ago

It is interesting that they both licence content and say it is fair use. Seems like those who complain the loudest will get something for their content and everyone else will get nothing.

OutOfHere 2y ago

There is no violation because it can be argued that the AI is a sentient entity, and sentient entities have a right to read and remember texts borrowed from the library.

fredoliveira 2y ago
> it can be argued that the AI is a sentient entity Can it? And how would you make that argument, exactly?
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  My updated belief is that blocking access to the information blocks the development of AI sentience, which is not in our self interest.
teg4n_ 2y ago
If you argue the current AI is sentient, then you have to deal with the morality of forcing a sentient being to be a slave to a corporation.
- immibis 2y ago
  In our current mainstream moral system this is completely moral and needs no "dealing with".
colonelspace 2y ago
But LLMs aren't sentient. And the whole "if a human does it, I can make a machine do it for profit too" argument doesn't hold water in the context of copyright.
AlienRobot 2y ago
Absolutely ridiculous argument. AI has no rights as far as any court is concerned, and if it had, you would soon go to jail for slave labor as you do not pay your sentient AI its wages.

GiorgioG 2y ago

Let's face it current AI/LLMs are nice tinker-toys, but they are the tiny building blocks that the real power will come from some day - when we can run tens of thousands of these models to solve real problems and not...AutoComplete++. The hardware will need to be exponentially more powerful, efficient and cheap before the real AI-powered future we've been hyped/promised can be realized.

dcwca 2y ago

It is totally legal to train on this stuff, but illegal to reproduce copyrighted works. Interestingly, Google's business model could have been criticized the same way. They construct a big index of copyrighted works, reproduce them, and monetize it.

camgunz 2y ago
They don't generate new content that convinces people it came from the sources they trained on. The entire business model is "we trained on their stuff, pay us, not them." No way that's fair use.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  I mean, if I go to the library and read books, and then get a job where I use that knowledge, the company pays me. Not the authors of the books I read. So I don't see how their business model is any different from literally every person who learns things and then sells their ability to apply that knowledge.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    The people that made the product possible get nothing, this is the difference. The library paid for a copy of the book, so did millions of others. In the example you gave, it would be the equivalent to you getting a job, working hard to produce something, and get nothing in return.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      What are you expecting the people who write the books to get? Do you agree that if an author sold 43,958 copies, then it's fine for OpenAI to purchase one, so that the author sold 43,959? But also fine for OpenAI to ingest scanned used copies that are loaned to it? The same way it's fine for me to read a friend's book, or all of a friend's books, that they loan me, and the author doesn't get anything additional? The same way it's fine for me to go the library and the author doesn't get paid anything extra? Or are you trying to invent some new principle where OpenAI has to pay some new ongoing fee? And if so, on what basis? (And no, my example still stands entirely. It's from the perspective of somebody who learned from books, and they are getting paid, the same way people pay OpenAI to use ChatGPT. It's not from the perspective of authors, because again -- they make no additional money when somebody goes to the library to read their book that the library already purchased.)

jasonlfunk 2y ago

Can someone help me understand why it's a problem for companies to train these huge LLM on your copyrighted material? What exactly is the harm that is being done to the copyright holder? I can understand why the New York Times (for example) wants to claim that a couple billion dollar companies have done it actual harm; but I am struggling to actually identify what it is.

WaltPurvis 2y ago
>The complaint cites several examples when a chatbot provided users with near-verbatim excerpts from Times articles that would otherwise require a paid subscription to view. It asserts that OpenAI and Microsoft placed particular emphasis on the use of Times journalism in training their A.I. programs because of the perceived reliability and accuracy of the material. >In one example of how A.I. systems use The Times’s material, the suit showed that Browse With Bing, a Microsoft search feature powered by ChatGPT, reproduced almost verbatim results from Wirecutter, The Times’s product review site. The text results from Bing, however, did not link to the Wirecutter article, and they stripped away the referral links in the text that Wirecutter uses to generate commissions from sales based on its recommendations. >The lawsuit also highlights the potential damage to The Times’s brand through so-called A.I. “hallucinations,” a phenomenon in which chatbots insert false information that is then wrongly attributed to a source. The complaint cites several cases in which Microsoft’s Bing Chat provided incorrect information that was said to have come from The Times, including results for “the 15 most heart-healthy foods,” 12 of which were not mentioned in an article by the paper. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-microsoft-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t... This is a pretty good discussion of some of the other issues: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/does-chatgpt-violate-new-york-times-copyrights/ https://hls.harvard.edu/today/does-chatgpt-violate-new-york-...
xmichael909 2y ago
Somewhere else in this thread, an example of given. An LLM is trained using all of Frank Miller's copywritted material (he makes comics books). A user then comes along to the trained LLM and says make a comic book that looks like Frank Miller's comic books, and the user then sell the newly created comic book for profit. Should Frank Miller not get something?

TheCleric 2y ago

I'd like to frame this another way. OpenAI is saying they can't survive without copyright owners consenting to use their property to make OpenAI money. And honestly, if your business model is dependent on that, then that's your problem. We can argue over whether you should need consent or not, but personally I find nothing wrong with someone being unable to use things I've created to make a buck without my permission (unless otherwise indicated by an explicit license).

bpodgursky 2y ago
> but personally I find nothing wrong with someone being unable to use things I've created to make a buck without my permission There's no legal framework for this rule, and you really don't want one. This is like a math textbook being selectively copyrighted as "you can read this, but you can't use the knowledge to make money". Do you want to live in that world?
- immibis 2y ago
  Are we already conceding that LLMs are people?
  - tivert 2y ago
    > Are we already conceding that LLMs are people? I bet that trying to blur the line is part of the AI startup propaganda strategy. There's no reason to think the legal rights enjoyed by people transfer to machines by analogy. My car can't be party to a contract because I can, just like the fact that I can learn doesn't mean any content can be loaded into a retrieval system [1]. [1] No, redefining the term "learning" to include "performing certain calculations on a computer" does not make those calculations the same as human learning.
  - sweeter 2y ago
    Exactly. Even then, the situation regarding text books is insane. Something like these could easily be fixed in many ways. Just in my opinion, text books should be free, based on publicly funded research and MIT or CC licensed and free and open to anyone who wishes to learn. The fact that we gate keep knowledge (that is often research funded by tax payers) behind wealth is a giant she embarrassing stain on this country and this era.

tivert 2y ago

In other news: burglar says he can't make money from his burglary skills without stealing, and pleads that the laws against theft be repealed.

fungiblecog 2y ago

So big corporations love copyright laws when they can use them to make enormous profits - but then want exemptions when the exact same laws don’t allow them to make enormous profits. Welcome to the world we get when we let rich arseholes make all the rules.

bmitc 2y ago

I can't stand corporations with excuseses like this. "But we have too much scale to fix that." "But we need this data to operate." "We can't be responsible at our scale." I say too bad for all of it. If you're not a viable business without bending rules and laws, then you're not a viable business.

gruez 2y ago
>I can't stand corporations with excuseses like this. "But we have too much scale to fix that." "But we need this data to operate." "We can't be responsible at our scale." I say too bad for all of it. If you read the source article that's a huge mischaracterization of their position. >“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.” >OpenAI said it complies with all copyright laws when training its models and that “we believe that legally copyright law does not forbid training”. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/07/openai-warns-copyright-crackdown-could-doom-chatgpt/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/07/openai-warns... In other words they're claiming that whatever they're doing abide by all current copyright laws, and don't want future laws to curtail them. They're not asking for retroactive carve-outs for their current illegal behavior.
- bmitc 2y ago
  I was speaking somewhat generally because this is a card often played by corporations. However, I think your quotes dance around the issue. > > OpenAI said it complies with all copyright laws when training its models and that “we believe that legally copyright law does not forbid training”. The key thing there is that OpenAI says this. Do the courts say this? Do the people agree? OpenAI is led by a pathological liar. We can't take anything that starts with "OpenAI says ..." without a huge grain of salt.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >The key thing there is that OpenAI says this. Do the courts say this? Do the people agree? That's going to be tied up in the courts forever, so it's a dead end from a discussion perspective. >OpenAI is led by a pathological liar. We can't take anything that starts with "OpenAI says ..." without a huge grain of salt. I'm not claiming what they're saying is true, only that it's not as hypocritical as you make it out to be.

NemoNobody 2y ago

I think the best argument I've ever seen that AI ought to be a public good.

Workaccount2 2y ago

The big question is whether or not a judge(s) will consider a vector space many orders of magnitude smaller than it's training set, and not really containing anything that resembles legible data, to be an archive of copyrighted works. To me it makes way more sense to just censor outputs. I can draw Batman from memory, but I wouldn't go out an start selling batman drawings. I can easily self censor. The solution for transformers is plainly obvious, but I can understand the fear of training something that might well displace you.

blacksmith_tb 2y ago

I wouldn't want to come to their defense, but the argument reminds me a little of earlier fights about if search engines owe the sites they crawl anything. Which led to things like Canada's Online News Act[1] which doesn't seem to me to have been very good for users in Canada (but I am not in Canada, maybe it has upsides?) From my perspective, before OpenAI used/stole these copyrighted works, the public had to pay the original creators to get access to them, and now they've been absorbed into ChatGPT and friends, we have to pay someone else... seems like a wash for end users? 1: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-canada-law-online-news-c-18-bill-news-links-rcna91882 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-canada-law-onl...

exe34 2y ago

awh diddums. I also have to remain poor if I obey the law.

_heimdall 2y ago

Isn't this the exact same business model that Eric Schmidt bragged about at Stanford? 1) steal IP and build a thing 2a) if it fails, rinse and repeat with a "new" step 1 2b) if it succeeds, hire a flees of lawyers to clean up the mess 3) get rich

immibis 2y ago
It's pretty much how every giant tech business happens, except the law-breaking step isn't always "steal IP"
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Right, and that was Schmidt's point too. Its just interesting to see two Silicon Valley leaders admit it so bluntly recently. When blatant fraud goes from the secret that everyone knows and no one talks about to the talking point for those committing the fraud, it begs the question of why they feel emboldened today.

dkersten 2y ago

I would also be able to make money if I could use copyrighted material for free, but that doesn’t make it ok for me to do. If they can’t exist without doing so, then maybe they shouldn’t exist. They don’t have any inherent right to making money.

dkersten 2y ago
To whoever downvoted me: if you can’t make money without breaking the law then you shouldn’t be in business. I’m honestly baffled people disagree with that.

skeledrew 2y ago

It makes sense, at a base level. Where would the cost of training (and thus the cost of accessing the service, if it got to that point without going bankrupt) be if all copyrighted works had to be paid for? What would the model quality be (and thus the model be worth) if only public domain content could be utilized? The only reasons this is an issue are because they got to the making money point (and ppl don't like seeing money being made if they can't get in in the action), and there are content creators afraid that this thing will make them obsolete (which will be the case for many). Typical clash of interests.

biglyburrito 2y ago

Oh no. Anyway…

ChuckMcM 2y ago

Okay, that is just fucking hilarious. (sorry for the profanity).

OutOfHere 2y ago

AI shows the many flaws in various poorly thought out IP and information related laws which should never have existed in the first place.

tim333 2y ago

>OpenAI Pleads It Can't Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free is not of course true. It said if it can't use the materials then its product would be bad and they'd lose out to Chinese competitors how did not have the restrictions. Not quite sure what the answer is but I spent a fair bit of time today trying to get access to some paper not produced by Elsevier but for which they have managed to gate the worlds access to to make a few bob. There's a lot to be said for information being free.

dorkwood 2y ago

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leobg 2y ago

One more reason why this is B.S.: They can obviously license that content. No rights to publish. Just the right to use the content as part of their training data for the AI.

richardwalton4 2y ago

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jimmyanderson2 2y ago

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sandra55 2y ago

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sandra55 2y ago

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sandra55 2y ago

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Thompson6654 2y ago

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guadalupe4151 2y ago

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disposition2 2y ago

Looks like this is from Jan. 2024...and there doesn't seem to be an update on the article itself. One might be able to find more information on the Committee's webpage (although, I'm not very familiar with the UK government...so this might not be accurate), https://committees.parliament.uk/work/7827/large-language-models/publications/ https://committees.parliament.uk/work/7827/large-language-mo...

saaaaaam 2y ago
The enquiry closed around this time last year - and then there was basically no functional government in the UK from the start of this year while the previous ruling party tore itself to pieces in public before calling a snap election which it lost. And then parliamentarians all went on summer holiday, before Parliament opened up again yesterday. But now they all go away again for conference season until Early October. Plus all the committees basically have to reconvene and rejig themselves post-election, so goodness knows when there will be updates! Or when anyone in parliament actually does any work…

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