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Core copyright violation moves ahead in The Intercept's lawsuit against OpenAI
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- philipwhiuk 2y agoIt's extremely lousy that you have to pre-register copyright. That would make the USCO a defacto clearinghouse for news.
- throw646577 2y agoYou don't have to pre-register copyright in any Berne Convention countries. Your copyright exists from the moment you create something. (ETA: This paragraph below is diametrically wrong. Sorry.) AFAIK in the USA, registered copyright is necessary if you want to bring a lawsuit and get more than statutory damages, which are capped low enough that corporations do pre-register work. Not the case in all Berne countries; you don't need this in the UK for example, but then the payouts are typically a lot lower in the UK. Statutory copyright payouts in the USA can be enough to make a difference to an individual author/artist. As I understand it, OpenAI could still be on the hook for up to $150K per article if it can be demonstrated it is wilful copyright violation. It's hard to see how they can argue with a straight face that it is accidental. But then OpenAI is, like several other tech unicorns, a bad faith manufacturing device.
- Loughla 2y agoYou seem to know more about this than me. I have a family member who "invented" some electronics things. He hasn't done anything with the inventions (I'm pretty sure they're quackery). But to ensure his patent, he mailed himself a sealed copy of the plans. He claims the postage date stamp will hold up in court if he ever needs it. Is that a thing? Or is it just more tinfoil business? It's hard to tell with him.
- throw646577 2y agoHonestly I don't know whether that actually is a meaningful thing to do anymore; it may be with patents. It certainly used to be a legal device people used. Essentially it is low-budget notarisation. If your family member believes they have something which is timely and valuable, it might be better to seek out proper legal notarisation, though -- you'd consult a Notary Public: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notary_public https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notary_public
- cma 2y agoThe USmoved to first to file years ago. Whoever files first gets it, except if he publishes it publicly there is a 1-year inventor's grace period (it would not apply to a self mail or private mail to other people). This is patent, not copyright.
- WillAdams 2y agoIt won't hold up in court, and given that the post-office will mail/deliver unsealed letters (which may then be sealed after the fact), will be viewed rather dimly. Buy your family member a copy of: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58734571-patent-it-yourself-by-david-pressman-nolo https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58734571-patent-it-yours...
- Y_Y 2y agoSurely the NSA will retain a copy which can be checked
- Tuna-Fish 2y agoEven if they did, it in fact cannot be checked. There is precedent that you cannot subpoena NSA for their intercepts, because exactly what has been intercepted and stored is privileged information.
- hiatus 2y ago> There is precedent that you cannot subpoena NSA for their intercepts I know it's tangential to this thread but could you link to further reading?
- Isamu 2y agoRight, you can register before you bring a lawsuit. Pre-registration makes your claim stronger, as does notice of copyright.
- dataflow 2y agoThat's what I thought too, but why does the article say: > Infringement suits require that relevant works were first registered with the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO).
- throw646577 2y agoOK so it turns out I am wrong here! Cool. I have it upside down/diametrically wrong, however you see fit. Right that structures exist, exactly wrong on how they apply. It is registration that guarantees access to statutory damages: https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/copyright/infringement/damages-in-copyright-infringement-cases/ https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/copyright/infri... Without registration you still have your natural copyright, but you would have to try to recover the profits made by the infringer. Which does sound like more of an uphill struggle for The Intercept, because OpenAI could maybe just say "anything we earn from this is de minimis considering how much errr similar material is errrr in the training set" Oh man it's going to take a long time for me to get my brain to accept this truth over what I'd always understood.
- zerocrates 2y agoYou have to register to sue, but you have the copyright automatically at the moment the work is created. You can go register after an infringement and still sue, but you then won't be able to get statutory damages or attorney's fees. Statutory damages are a big deal in general but especially here where proving how much of OpenAI's revenue is due to your specific articles is probably impossible. Which is why they're suing under this DMCA provision: it's not an infringement suit so the registration requirement doesn't apply, and there's a separate statutory damages provision for it.
- pera 2y ago> It's hard to see how they can argue with a straight face that it is accidental It's another instance of "move fast, break things" (i.e. "keep your eyes shut while breaking the law at scale")
- renewiltord 2y agoYes, because all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
- 0xcde4c3db 2y agoThe claim that's being allowed to proceed is under 17 USC 1202, which is about stripping metadata like the title and author. Not exactly "core copyright violation". Am I missing something?
- anamexis 2y agoI read the headline as the copyright violation claim being core to the lawsuit.
- H8crilA 2y agoThe plaintiffs focused on exactly this part - removal of metadata - probably because it's the most likely to hold in courts. One judge remarked on it pretty explicitly, saying that it's just a proxy topic for the real issue of the usage of copyrighted material in model training. I.e., it's some legalese trick, but "everyone knows" what's really at stake.
- 0xcde4c3db 2y agoYeah; I think that's essentially where the disconnect is rooted for me. It seems to me (a non-lawyer, to be clear) that it's damn hard to make the case for model training necessarily being meat-and-potatoes "infringement" as things are defined in Title 17 Chapter 1. I see it as firmly in the grey area between "a mere change of physical medium or deterministic mathematical transformation clearly isn't a defense against infringement on its own" and "giant toke come on, man, Terry Brooks was obviously just ripping off Tolkien". There might be a tension between what constitutes "substantial similarity" through analog and digital lenses, especially as the question pertains to those who actually distribute weights.
- kyledrake 2y agoI think you're at the heart of it, and you've humorously framed the grey area here and it's very weird. Sans a ruling that, for example, computers are too deterministic to be creative, copyright laws really seem to imply that LLM training is legal. Learning and then creating something new from what you learned isn't copyright infringement, so what's the legal argument here? A ruling declaring this copyright infringement is likely going to have crazy ripple effects going way beyond LLMs, something a good judge is going to be very mindful of. Ultimately, this is probably going to require congress to create new laws to codify this.
- james_sulivan 2y agoMeanwhile China is using everything available to train their AI models
- goatlover 2y agoWe don't want to be like China.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoFair. But I made a comment somewhere else that, if their models become better than ours, they'll be incorporated into products. Then we're back to being depended on China for LLM model development as well, on top of manufacturing. Realistically that'll be banned because of National Security laws or something, but companies tend to choose the path of "best and cheapest" no matter what.
- paxys 2y agoYou think china is using uncensored news articles from western media to train its AI models?
- warkdarrior 2y agoFor sure. The models are definitely safety tuned after pre-training
- dmead 2y agoYes. And they're being marked as bad during the alignment process.
- luqtas 2y ago[flagged]
- mort96 2y agoI mean it could also be that this is just a case of an OpenAI spokesperson repeating the OpenAI party line? OpenAI's very existence depends on training LLMs on copyrighted works being considered fair use, so I would be extremely surprised if any spokesperson ever hinted that it might not be fair use. I can see where you're coming from with wanting the government to be more proactive in clamping down on illegal practices. But it's pretty standard, from what I understand, that violations civil law only has consequences if and when an aggrieved party goes to court.
- luqtas 2y agoit's a ~ 160 billion company that only reached this far because of copyright violation Sora's presentation [0]: on multiple text input examples "... the video does not contain any text or additional objects." are you gonna say it's a prompt for no text on signs or banners or is it a way to get rid of subtitles & watermark logos? [0] https://hpcaitech.github.io/Open-Sora/ https://hpcaitech.github.io/Open-Sora/
- mort96 2y agoYeah, as I said, I see where you're coming from. I'm just saying that, as far as I understand, it's not unusual in any way. In fact, it almost seems to be a part of the Silicon Valley VC playbook to blatantly break the law and either grow so huge that the law has to change to accommodate, or cash out before the law breaking has consequences.
- zb3 2y agoForecast: OpenAI and The Intercept will settle and OpenAI users will pay for it.
- jsheard 2y agoYep, the game plan is to keep settling out of court so that (they hope) no legal precedent is set that would effectively make their entire business model illegal. That works until they run out of money I guess, but they probably can't keep it up forever.
- echoangle 2y agoWouldn’t the better method to throw all your money at one suit you can make an example of and try to win that one? You can’t effectively settle every single suit if you have no realistic chance of winning, otherwise every single publisher on the internet will come and try to get their money.
- lokar 2y agoToo high risk. Every year you can delay you keep lining your pockets.
- gr3ml1n 2y agoThat's a good strategy, but you have to have the right case. One where OpenAI feels confident they can win and establish favorable precedent. If the facts of the case aren't advantageous, it's probably not worth the risk.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoSide question, why doesn't other companies get the same attention? Anthropic, xAI and others have deep pockets, and scraped the same data, I'm assuming? It could be a gold mine for all these news agencies to keep settling out of court to make some buck.
- ysofunny 2y agothe very idea of "this digital asset is exclusively mine" cannot die soon enough let real physically tangible assets keep the exclusivity problem let's not undo the advantages unlocked by the digital internet; let us prevent a few from locking down this grand boon of digital abundance such that the problem becomes saturation of data let us say no to digital scarcity
- cess11 2y agoI think you'll find that most people aren't comfortable with this in practice. They'd like e.g. the state to be able to keep secrets, such as personal information regarding citizens and the stuff foreign spies would like to copy.
- jMyles 2y agoObviously we're all impacted in these perceptions by our bubbles, but it would surprise me at this particular moment in the history of US politics to find that most people favor the existence of the state at all, let alone its ability to keep secret personal information regarding citizens.
- goatlover 2y agoMost people aren't anarchists, and think the state is necessary for complex societies to function.
- jMyles 2y agoMy sense is that the constituency of people who prefer deprecation of the US state is much larger than just anarchists.
- noitpmeder 2y agoSound like you exist in some very insulated bubbles.
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- whywhywhywhy 2y agoIt's so weird to me seeing journalists complaining about copyright and people taking something they did. The whole of journalism is taking the acts of others and repeating them, why does a journalist claim they have the rights to someone else's actions when someone simply looks at something they did and repeat it. If no one else ever did anything, the journalist would have nothing to report, it's inherently about replicating the work and acts of others.
- razakel 2y agoOr you could just not do illegal and/or immoral things that are worthy of reporting.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- barapa 2y agoThis is terribly unpersuasive
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago> The whole of journalism is taking the acts of others and repeating them Hilarious (and depressing) that this is what people think journalists do.
- SoftTalker 2y agoWhat is a "journalist?" It sounds old-fashioned. They are "content creators" now.
- echoangle 2y agoThat’s a pretty narrow view of journalism. If you look into newspapers, it’s not just a list of events but also opinion pieces, original research, reports etc. The main infringement isn’t with the basic reporting of facts but with the original part that’s done by the writer.
- hydrolox 2y agoI understand that regulations exist and how there can be copyright violations, but shouldn't we be concerned that other.. more lenient governments (mainly China) who are opposed to the US will use this to get ahead? If OpenAI is significantly set back.
- fny 2y agoNo. OpenAI is suspected to be worth over $150B. They can absolutely afford to pay people for data. Edit: People commenting need to understand that $150B is the discounted value of future revenues. So... yes they can pay out... yes they will be worth less... and yes that's fair to the people who created the information. I can't believe there are so many apologists on HN for what amounts to vacuuming up peoples data for financial gain.
- suby 2y agoOpenAI is not profitable, and to achieve what they have achieved they had to scrape basically the entire internet. I don't have a hard time believing that OpenAI could not exist if they had to respect copyright. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-this-year-on-3point7-billion-in-revenue.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-t...
- jpalawaga 2y agotechnically open ai has respected copyright, except in the (few) instances they produce non-fair-use amounts of copyrighted material. dmca does not cover scraping.
- noitpmeder 2y agoThat's a good thing! If a company cannot raise to fame unless they violate laws, it should not have been there. There is plenty of public domain text that could have taught a LLM English.
- suby 2y ago
- agilob 2y ago[flagged]
- mrweasel 2y agoIf OpenAI is evading paywalls, then the Aaron Swartz case should be considered precedent. The scale is just much much large and it's for financial gains, but not motivated by morals.
- sottol 2y ago> and it's for financial gains, but not motivated by morals. Which is why nothing is going to happen, can't have people starting with the latter.
- quarterdime 2y agoInteresting. Two key quotes: > It is unclear if the Intercept ruling will embolden other publications to consider DMCA litigation; few publications have followed in their footsteps so far. As time goes on, there is concern that new suits against OpenAI would be vulnerable to statute of limitations restrictions, particularly if news publishers want to cite the training data sets underlying ChatGPT. But the ruling is one signal that Loevy & Loevy is narrowing in on a specific DMCA claim that can actually stand up in court. > Like The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet are asking for $2,500 in damages for each instance that OpenAI allegedly removed DMCA-protected information in its training data sets. If damages are calculated based on each individual article allegedly used to train ChatGPT, it could quickly balloon to tens of thousands of violations. Tens of thousands of violations at $2500 each would amount to tens of millions of dollars in damages. I am not familiar with this field, does anyone have a sense of whether the total cost of retraining (without these alleged DMCA violations) might compare to these damages?
- Xelynega 2y agoIf you're going to retrain your model because of this ruling, wouldn't it make sense to remove all DMCA protected content from your training data instead of just the one you were most recently sued for(especially if it sets precedent)
- jsheard 2y agoIt would make sense from a legal standpoint, but I don't think they could do that without massively regressing their models performance to the point that it would jeopardize their viability as a company.
- zozbot234 2y agoThey might make it work by (1) having lots of public domain content, for the purpose of training their models on basic language use, and (2) preserving source/attribution metadata about what copyrighted content they do use, so that the models can surface this attribution to the user during inference. Even if the latter is not 100% foolproof, it might still be useful in most cases and show good faith intent.
- logicchains 2y agoEventually we're going to have embodied models capable of live learning and it'll be extremely apparent how absurd the ideas of the copyright extremists are. Because in their world, it'd be illegal for an intelligent robot to watch TV, read a book or browse the internet like a human can, because it could remember what it saw and potentially regurgitate it in future.
- luqtas 2y agoproblem is when a human company profits over their scrape... this isn't a non-profit running out of volunteers & a total distant reality from autonomous robots learning it way by itself we are discussing an emergent cause that has social & ecological consequences. servers are power hungry stuff that may or not run on a sustainable grid (that also has a bazinga of problems like leaking heavy chemicals on solar panels production, hydro-electric plants destroying their surroundings etc.) & the current state of producing hardware, be a sweatshop or conflict minerals. lets forget creators copyright violation that is written in the law code of almost every existing country and no artist is making billions out of the abuse of their creation right (often they are pretty chill on getting their stuff mentioned, remixed and whatever)
- jazzyjackson 2y ago[flagged]
- openrisk 2y agoLeaving aside the hypothetical "live learning AGI" of the future (given that money is made or lost now), would a human regurgitating content that is not theirs - but presented as if it is - be acceptable to you?
- CuriouslyC 2y agoI don't know about you but my friends don't tell me that Joe Schmoe of Reuters published a report that said XYZ copyright XXXX. They say "XYZ happened."
- 2y ago
- Shalah 2y ago[dead]
- 3pt14159 2y agoIs there a way to figure out if OpenAI ingested my blog? If the settlements are $2500 per article then I'll take a free used cars worth of payments if its available.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoI suppose the cost of legal representation would cancel it out. I can just imagine a class action where anyone who posted on blogger.com between 2002 and 2012 eventually gets a check for 28 dollars. If I were more optimistic I could imagine a UBI funded by lawsuits against AGI, some combination of lost wages and intellectual property infringement. Can't figure out exactly how much more important an article on The Intercept had on shifting weights than your hacker news comments, might as well just pay everyone equally since we're all equally screwed
- dwattttt 2y agoWouldn't the point of the class action to be to dilute the cost of representation? If the damages per article are high and there's plenty of class members, I imagine the limit would be how much OpenAI has to pay out.
- SahAssar 2y agoIf you posted on blogger.com (or any platform with enough money to hire lawyers) you probably gave them a license that is irrevocable, non-exclusive and able to be sublicensed. There are reasons for that (they need a license to show it on the platform) but usually these agreements are overly broad because everyone except the user is covering their ass too much. Those licenses will now be used to sell that content/data for purposes that nobody thought about when you started your account.
- Brajeshwar 2y agoThere was a Washington Post article that did something on this (but not for OpenAI). Check if your website is there at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/a... There should a was to check for OpenAI. But my guess is, if Google does it, OpenAI and others must be using the same/similar resource pool. My website has some 56K Token and I have no clue what that was, but something is there https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2tq4mg16jup2qyk3os6ox/brajeshwar.com-on-google-ai-training-model.jpeg?rlkey=lvn99myqoc7d7008yuj46bfu3&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2tq4mg16jup2qyk3os6ox/brajesh...
- olddog2 2y ago[flagged]
- bogwog 2y agoand I bet he's turning the frogs gay too!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bastloing 2y agoIsn't this the same thing Google has been doing for years with their search engine? Only difference is Google keeps the data internal, whereas openai spits it out to you. But it's still scraped and stored in both cases.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoA component of fair use is to what degree the derivative work displaces the original. Google's argument has always been that they direct traffic to the original, whereas AI summaries (which Google of course is just as guilty of as openai) completely obsoletes the original publication. The argument now is that the derivative work (LLM model) is transformative, ie, different enough that it doesn't economically compete with the original. I think it's a losing argument but we'll see what the courts arrive at.
- CaptainFever 2y agoIs this specific to AI or specific to summaries in general? Do summaries, like the ones found in Wikipedia or Cliffs Notes, not have the same effect of making it such that people no longer have to view the original work as much? Note: do you mean the model is transformative, or the summaries are transformative? I think your comment holds up either way but I think it's better to be clear which one you mean.
- LinuxBender 2y agoIn my opinion not a lawyer, Google at least references where they obtained the data and did not regurgitate it as if they were the creators that created something new. obfuscated plagiarism via LLM. Some claim derivative works but I have always seen that as quite a stretch. People here expect me to cite references yet LLM's somehow escape this level of scrutiny.
- efitz 2y agoI would trust AI a lot more if it gave answers more like: “Source A on date 1 said XYX” “Source B …” “Synthesizing these, it seems that the majority opinion is X but Y is also a commonly held opinion.” Instead of what it does now, which is make extremely confident, unsourced statements. It looks like the copyright lawsuits are rent-seeking as much as anything else; another reason I hate copyright in its current form.
- CaptainFever 2y agoChatGPT Search provides this, by the way, though it relies a lot on the quality of Bing search results. Consensus.app does this but for research papers, and has been very useful to me.
- maronato 2y agoMore often than not in my experience, clicking these sources takes me to pages that either don’t exist, don’t have the information ChatGPT is quoting, or ChatGPT completely misinterpreted the content.
- akira2501 2y ago> which is make extremely confident, One of the results the LLM has available to itself is a confidence value. It should, at the very least, provide this along with it's answer. Perhaps if it did people would stop calling it 'AI'.'
- pavon 2y agoMy understanding is that this confidence value is not a measure of how likely something is correct/true, but more along the lines of how likely that sentence would be. Including it could be more misleading than helpful, for example if it is repeating commonly misunderstood information.
- ethernot 2y agoI'm not sure that it's possible to produce anything reasonable in that space. It would need to know how far it is away from correct to provide a usable confidence value otherwise it'd just be hallucinating a number in the same way as the result. An analogy. Take a former commuter friend of mine, Mr Skol (named after his favourite breakfast drink). Seen on a minibus I had to get to work years ago, we shared many interesting conversations. Now he was a confident expert on everything. If asked to rate his confidence in a subject it would be a good 95% at least. However he spoke absolute garbage because his brain was rotten away from drinking Skol for breakfast, and the odd crack chaser. I suspect his model was still better than GPT-4o. But an average person could determine the veracity of his arguments. Thus confidence should be externally rated as an entity with knowledge cannot necessarily rate itself for it has bias. Which then brings in the question of how do you do that. Well you'd have to do the research you were going to do anyway and compare. So now you've used the AI and done the research which you would have had to do if the AI didn't exist. So the AI at this point becomes a cost over benefit if you need something with any level of confidence and accuracy. Thus the value is zero unless you need crap information, which is at least here, never, unless I'm generating a picture of a goat driving a train or something. And I'm not sure that has any commercial value. But it's fun at least.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoWill we see human washing, where Ai art or works get a "Made by man" final touch in some third world mechanical turk den? Would that add another financial detracting layer to the ai winter?
- Retric 2y agoThe law generally takes a dim view of such attempts to get around things like that. AI biggest defense is claiming they are so beneficial to society that what they are doing is fine.
- gmueckl 2y agoThat argument stands on the mother of all slippery slopes! Just find a way to make your product mpressive or ubiquitous and all of a sudden it doesn't matter how much you break the law along the way? That's so insane I don't even know where to start.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoWorked for purdue
- Retric 2y agoYouTube, AirBnB, Uber, and many many others have all done stuff that’s blatant against the law but gotten away with it due to utility.
- rcxdude 2y agoWhy not, considering copyright law specifically has fair use outlined for that kind of thing? It's not some overriding consequence of law, it's that copyright is a granting of a privilege to individuals and that that privilege is not absolute.
- gaganyaan 2y agoThat is not in any way the biggest defense
- ada1981 2y agoI’m still of the opinion that we should be allowed to train on any data a human can read online.
- smitelli 2y ago…Limited to a human’s average rate of consumption, right?
- warkdarrior 2y agoYes, just like my download speed is capped by the speed of me writing bytes on paper.
- ada1981 2y agoIs there any other information processing we limit to human speed?
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoYeah, let's stop the progress because a few magazines no one cares about are unhappy.
- a57721 2y agoMaybe just don't use data from the unhappy magazines you don't care about in the first place?
- bastloing 2y agoWho would be forever grateful if openai removed all of The Intercept's content permanently and refused to crawl it in the future?
- noitpmeder 2y agoSure, and then do that with every other piece of work theyre unfairly using
- bastloing 2y agoI'd actually leave it up to the owner. Some want their work removed, some don't care.
- dr_dshiv 2y agoProposed: 10% tax as copyright settlement, half to pay for past creators and and half to pay current creative culture
- _giorgio_ 2y agoJust train the models in Japan. *No copyright.* https://insights.manageengine.com/artificial-intelligence/the-us-should-look-at-japans-unique-approach-to-generative-ai-copyright-law/ https://insights.manageengine.com/artificial-intelligence/th... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38842788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38842788
- theropost 2y agoCopyright laws, in many ways, feel outdated and unnecessarily rigid. They often appear to disproportionately favor large corporations without providing equivalent value to society. For example, brands like Disney have leveraged long-running copyrights to generate billions, or even tens of billions, of dollars through enforcement over extended periods. This approach feels excessive and unsustainable. The reliance on media saturation and marketing creates a perception that certain works are inherently more valuable than others, despite new creative works constantly being developed. While I agree that companies should have the right to profit from their investments, such as a $500 million movie, there should be reasonable limits. Once they recoup their costs, including a reasonable profit multiplier, the copyright could be considered fulfilled and should expire. Holding onto copyrights indefinitely or for excessively long periods serves primarily to sustain a system that benefits lawyers and enforcement agencies, rather than providing meaningful value to society. For instance, enforcing a copyright from the 1940s for a multinational corporation that already generates billions makes little sense. There should be a balanced framework. If I invest significant time and effort—say 100 hours—into creating a work, I should be entitled to earn a reasonable return, perhaps 10 times the effort I put in. However, after that point, the copyright should no longer apply. Current laws have spiraled out of control, failing to strike a balance between protecting creators and fostering innovation. Reform is long overdue.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoI am personally in favor of strong, short copyrights (and patents). 90+ year copyrights are just absurd. Most movies make almost all their money in the first 10 years anyway, and a strong 10- or 20-year copyright would keep the economics of movie and music production largely the same.
- voxic11 2y agoI think the biggest change would be that if characters and stories lose their copyright after 10 years then you would see even more sequels and remakes because anyone could make their own Star Wars sequel series for example.
- tolmasky 2y agoThe logical endgame of all this isn’t “stopping LLMs,” it’s Disney happening to own a critical mass of IP to be able to more or less exclusively legally train and run LLMs that make movies, firing all their employees, and no smaller company ever having a chance in hell with competing with a literal century’s worth of IP powering a generative model. This turns the already egregiously generous backwards facing monopoly into a forward facing monopoly. None of this was ever the point of copyright. The best part about all this is that Disney initially took off by… making use of public domain works. Copyright used to last 14 years. You’d be able to create derivative works of most the art in your life at some point. Disney is ironically the proof of how constructive a system that regularly turns works over to the public domain can be. But thanks to lobbying by Disney, now you’re never allowed to create a derivative work of the art in your life. Copyright is only possible because we the public fund the infrastructure necessary to maintain it. “IP” isn’t self manifesting like physical items. Me having a cup necessarily means you don’t have it. That’s not how ideas and pictures work. You can infinitely perfectly duplicate them. Thus we set up laws and courts and police to create a complicated simulation of physical properties for IP. Your tax dollars pay for that. The original deal was that in exchange, those works would enter the public domain to give back to society. We’ve gotten so far from that that people now argue about OpenAI “stealing” from authors, when the authors most of the time don’t even own the works — their employers do! What a sad comedy where we’ve forgotten we have a stake in this too and instead argue over which corporation should “own” the exclusive ability to cheaply and blazingly fast create future works while everyone else has to do it the hard way.
- tzkaln 2y agoClosedAI etc. are certainly stealing from open source authors and web site creators, who do own the copyright. That said, I agree with putting more emphasis on individual creators, even if they have sold the copyright to corporations. I was appalled by the Google settlement with the author's guild: Why does a guild decide who owns what and who gets compensations? Both Disney and ClosedAI are in the wrong here. I'm the opposite of a Marxist, but Marx' analysis was frequently right. He used the term "alienation from one's work" in the context of factory workers. Now people are being alienated from their intellectual work, which is stolen, laundered and then sold back to them.
- torginus 2y agoHow sturdy is this claim? If we presume it's illegal to train on copyrighted works, but Wikipedia, a website summarizing the article is perfectly legal, then what would happen if we got LLM A to summarize the article and use that to train LLM B. LLM A could be trained on public domain works.
- vorpalhex 2y agoLLM B would be a very bad LLM with only limited vocabulary and turn of phrase, and would tend to have a single writing tone. And no, having 5000 different summarizing LLMs doesn't help here. It's sort of like taking a photograph of a photograph.
- miohtama 2y agoIf it is illegal to train on copyrighted work, it will also benefit actors that are free to ignore laws, like Chinese public private companies. It means Western companies will lose in the AI race.
- tapoxi 2y agoThen we don't respect their copyrights? Why is this some sort of unsolvable problem and the only solution is to allow mega corporations to sell us AI that is trained on the work of artists without their consent?