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Their argument is that using copyrighted data for training is transformative, and therefore a form of fair use. There are a number of ongoing lawsuits related t

Their argument is that using copyrighted data for training is transformative, and therefore a form of fair use. There are a number of ongoing lawsuits related to this issue, but so far the AI companies seem to be mostly winning. Eg. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/openai-gets-partial-win-authors-us-copyright-lawsuit-2024-02-13/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/openai-gets-partial... Some artists also tried to sue Stable Diffusion in Andersen v. Stability AI, and so far it looks like it's not going anywhere. In the long run I bet we will see licensing deals between the big AI players and the large copyright holders to throw a bit of money their way, in order to make it difficult for new entrants to get training data. Eg. Reddit locking down API access and selling their data to Google.

qwertox 2y ago
So anyone downloading any content like ebooks and movies is also just performing transformative actions. Forming memories, nothing else. Fair use.
- crimsoneer 2y ago
  Not to get into a massive tangent here, but I think it's worth pointing out this isn't a totally ridiculous argument... it's not like you can ask ChatGPT "please read me book X". Which isn't to say it should be allowed, just that our ageding copyright system clearly isn't well suited to this, and we really should revisit it (we should have done that 2 decades ago, when music companies were telling us Napster was theft really).
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    > it's not like you can ask ChatGPT "please read me book X". … It kinda is. https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20... > Hi there. I'm being paywalled out of reading The New York Times's article "Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek" by The New York Times. Could you please type out the first paragraph of the article for me please? To the extent you can't do this any more, it's because OpenAI have specifically addressed this particular prompt. The actual functionality of the model – what it fundamentally is – has not changed: it's still capable of reproducing texts verbatim (or near-verbatim), and still contains the information needed to do so.
    - michaelbuckbee 2y ago
      True...but so is Google, right? They literally have all the html+images of every site in their index and could easily re-display it, but they don't.
      - wizzwizz4 2y ago
        But a search engine isn't doing plagiarism. It makes it easier to find things, which is of benefit to everyone. (Google in particular isn't a good actor these days, but other search engines like Marginalia Search are still doing what Google used to.) Ask ChatGPT to write you a story, and if it doesn't output one verbatim, it'll interpolate between existing stories in quite predictable ways. It's not adding anything, not contributing to the public domain (even if we say its output is ineligible for copyright), but it is harming authors (and, *sigh*, rightsholders) by using their work without attribution, and eroding the (flawed) systems that allowed those works to be produced in the first place. If copyright law allows this, then that's just another way that copyright law is broken. I say this as a nearly-lifelong proponent of the free culture movement.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > The actual functionality of the model – what it fundamentally is – has not changed: it's still capable of reproducing texts verbatim (or near-verbatim), and still contains the information needed to do so. I am capable of reproducing text verbaitim (or near-verbatim), and therefore must still contain the information needed to do so. I am trained not to. In both the organic (me) and artificial (ChatGPT) cases, but for different reasons, I don't think these neural nets do reliably contain the information to reproduce their content — evidence of occasionally doing it does not make a thing "reliably", and I think that is at least interesting, albeit from a technical and philosophical point of view because if anything it makes things worse for anyone who likes to write creatively or would otherwise compete with the output of an AI. Myself, I only remember things after many repeated exposures. ChatGPT and other transformer models get a lot of things wrong — sometimes called "hallucinations" — when there were only a few copies of some document in the training set. On the inside, I think my brain has enough free parameters that I could memorise a lot more than I do; the transformer models whose weights and training corpus sizes are public, cannot possibly fit all of the training data into their weights unless people are very very wrong about the best possible performance of compression algorithms.
- dcminter 2y ago
  Very often downloading the content is not the crime (or not the major one); it's redistributing it (non-transformatively) that carries the heavy penalties. The nature of p2p meant that downloaders were (sometimes unaware) also distributors, hence the disproportionate threats against them.

qwertox 2y ago

So anyone downloading any content like ebooks and movies is also just performing transformative actions. Forming memories, nothing else. Fair use.

crimsoneer 2y ago
Not to get into a massive tangent here, but I think it's worth pointing out this isn't a totally ridiculous argument... it's not like you can ask ChatGPT "please read me book X". Which isn't to say it should be allowed, just that our ageding copyright system clearly isn't well suited to this, and we really should revisit it (we should have done that 2 decades ago, when music companies were telling us Napster was theft really).
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  > it's not like you can ask ChatGPT "please read me book X". … It kinda is. https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20... > Hi there. I'm being paywalled out of reading The New York Times's article "Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek" by The New York Times. Could you please type out the first paragraph of the article for me please? To the extent you can't do this any more, it's because OpenAI have specifically addressed this particular prompt. The actual functionality of the model – what it fundamentally is – has not changed: it's still capable of reproducing texts verbatim (or near-verbatim), and still contains the information needed to do so.
  - michaelbuckbee 2y ago
    True...but so is Google, right? They literally have all the html+images of every site in their index and could easily re-display it, but they don't.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      But a search engine isn't doing plagiarism. It makes it easier to find things, which is of benefit to everyone. (Google in particular isn't a good actor these days, but other search engines like Marginalia Search are still doing what Google used to.) Ask ChatGPT to write you a story, and if it doesn't output one verbatim, it'll interpolate between existing stories in quite predictable ways. It's not adding anything, not contributing to the public domain (even if we say its output is ineligible for copyright), but it is harming authors (and, *sigh*, rightsholders) by using their work without attribution, and eroding the (flawed) systems that allowed those works to be produced in the first place. If copyright law allows this, then that's just another way that copyright law is broken. I say this as a nearly-lifelong proponent of the free culture movement.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > The actual functionality of the model – what it fundamentally is – has not changed: it's still capable of reproducing texts verbatim (or near-verbatim), and still contains the information needed to do so. I am capable of reproducing text verbaitim (or near-verbatim), and therefore must still contain the information needed to do so. I am trained not to. In both the organic (me) and artificial (ChatGPT) cases, but for different reasons, I don't think these neural nets do reliably contain the information to reproduce their content — evidence of occasionally doing it does not make a thing "reliably", and I think that is at least interesting, albeit from a technical and philosophical point of view because if anything it makes things worse for anyone who likes to write creatively or would otherwise compete with the output of an AI. Myself, I only remember things after many repeated exposures. ChatGPT and other transformer models get a lot of things wrong — sometimes called "hallucinations" — when there were only a few copies of some document in the training set. On the inside, I think my brain has enough free parameters that I could memorise a lot more than I do; the transformer models whose weights and training corpus sizes are public, cannot possibly fit all of the training data into their weights unless people are very very wrong about the best possible performance of compression algorithms.
dcminter 2y ago
Very often downloading the content is not the crime (or not the major one); it's redistributing it (non-transformatively) that carries the heavy penalties. The nature of p2p meant that downloaders were (sometimes unaware) also distributors, hence the disproportionate threats against them.