18 ms·

This is because they: expanded upon an existing sample-inefficient technology, commercialized the sample inefficient technology using copyrighted data, fundrais

• 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
  [dead]