5 ms·

NYT's statement of claims is here: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_De

NYT's statement of claims is here: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20... And OpenAI's defense is here: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrkxbmgpe/OPENAI%20MICROSOFT%20NEW%20YORK%20TIMES%20mtd.pdf https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrkxbmgpe/... OpenAI's defense, which I am not in a position to verify, is that ChatGPT can not be used to reproduce NYT's articles verbatim without a great deal of prompt engineering. That the submissions NYT provided of verbatim reproductions are the result of a third party expert who tried more than 10000 prompts that included feeding into ChatGPT portions of NYT articles in order to get ChatGPT to respond with verbatim reproductions of NYT articles and that no one uses ChatGPT in this manner. Furthermore the verbatim reproductions that ChatGPT did end up producing after these 10000 prompts are available on numerous public websites unaffiliated with NYT.

hiatus 2y ago
> and that no one uses ChatGPT in this manner Someone did though and was able to get verbatim reproductions of NYT articles out of it. > Furthermore the verbatim reproductions that ChatGPT did end up producing after these 10000 prompts are available on numerous public websites unaffiliated with NYT. So what? NYT as a copyright holder might have no issue with those unaffiliated sites but have an issue with OpenAI.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  This is a problem with copyright law. There is no way for an end user to determine the copyright status of anything on the Internet, you can only make an educated guess.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    It's pretty simple in the US. A work has a copyright regardless of whether it's registered or a notice placed on the work. Registration provides easier means of asserting your copyright but you have a copyright as soon as you create the work. If I wrote a handwritten note about OpenAI on a cocktail napkin then I have copyright over that work barring some challenge to whether it's a "creative work" or not. It doesn't matter what the medium is, or how it's shared. The internet makes this challenging in that it's essentially a shared technical means of disseminating the work, but the work remains copyrighted no matter how publicly available it might or might not be. It's just a matter of the rights-holder asserting their right. Which is something NYT does with their paywall all the time.
    - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
      As read you are asserting that public domain doesn't exist. Not only that, if something is available on the Internet, and still under copyright, you have no way of knowing whether the website is authorized to distribute it or not.
TrainedMonkey 2y ago
This feels like an extremely weak defense to me, because if it works it is essentially a copyright backdoor. 1. There is little doubt that OpenAI has NYT articles in it's dataset. 2. They claim it's OK because all of the IP is mixed together and effectively laundered. 3. But in fact if you put in a secret code you can get the IP back nearly verbatim. 4. So if OpenAI wins this case we could just trade prompts that regurgitate the articles back without ever visiting NYT.
- jrockway 2y ago
  I agree. If you gzip a NYT article and print it out, very few people would be able to read the article. But it can still be decoded ("prompt engineering" as OpenAI calls it).
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  Copyright maximalism in the 21st century can be summed up as: When an individual makes a single copy of a song and gives it to a friend, that's piracy. When a corporation makes subtlety different copies of thousands of works and sells them to customers, that's just fair use
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    NYT is a corporation. Corporation vs individual is a distraction. It’s some people (wrongly, in my view) prioritising production over consumption. If this were Altman personally producing an AI, the same people would rally to him. The corporate/individual framing needlessly inflames the debate when it’s really one about power and money.
    - delusional 2y ago
      I don't think it's "production over consumption". At least I don't like that framing. For me it's about supporting production. The humans that write news articles every day can't produce that valuable work if they don't get fairly compensated for it. It's not that the AI produces more, it's that the AI destabilizes production. It makes it impossible to produce.
freejazz 2y ago
> is that ChatGPT can not be used to reproduce NYT's articles verbatim without a great deal of prompt engineering You aren't allowed to infringe copyrights just because you make it difficult to do so. OpenAI's system should not be making verbatim copies at all.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  It's probably worth considering how the thing actually works. LLMs are sort of like a fancy compression dictionary that can be used to compress text, except that we kind of use them in reverse. Instead of compressing likely text into smaller bitstrings, they generate likely text. But you could also use them for compression of text because if you take some text, there is highly likely a much shorter prompt + seed that would generate the same text, provided that it's ordinary text with a common probability distribution. Which is basically what the lawyers are doing. Keep trying combinations until it generates the text you want. But the ability to do that isn't really that surprising. If you feed a copyrighted article to gzip, it will give you a much shorter string that you can then feed back to gunzip to get back the article. That doesn't mean gunzip has some flaw or ill intent. It also doesn't imply that the article is even stored inside of the compression library, rather than there just being a shorter string that can be used to represent it because it contains predictable patterns. It's not implausible that an LLM could generate a verbatim article it was never even trained on if you pushed on it hard enough, especially if it was trained on writing in a similar style and other coverage of the same event.
  - freejazz 2y ago
    > It's not implausible that an LLM could generate a verbatim article it was never even trained on if you pushed on it hard enough, especially if it was trained on writing in a similar style and other coverage of the same event. That'd be a coincidence, not a verbatim copy. Copyright law doesn't prohibit independent creation. This defense isn't available to OpenAI because there is no dispute OpenAI ingested the NYTimes articles in the first place. There is no plausible way OpenAI could say they never had access to the articles they are producing verbatim copies of. Rather than sneeringly explain away how LLMs work without any eye towards the laws at issue, maybe you should do yourself the favor of learning about them so you can spare us this incessent "no let me explain how they work, it's fine I swear!" shtick.
jay_kyburz 2y ago
Everybody seems to be focused on whether or not the OpenAI copied the data in training, but my understanding of copyright is that if a person when into a clean room and wrote an new article from scratch, without having read any NYT, that just so happened to be exactly the same as an existing NYT article, it would still be a copyright violation. As soon as OpenAI repeats a set of words verbatim, it violates copyright. The courts should examine how much damage an occasional verbatim regurgitation would damage NYTs business. (I would guess not much)
- nyssos 2y ago
  > but my understanding of copyright is that if a person when into a clean room and wrote an new article from scratch, without having read any NYT, that just so happened to be exactly the same as an existing NYT article, it would still be a copyright violation. It would not be. Independent creation is a complete defense against copyright infringement. Patents, however, do work this way.
- Maxatar 2y ago
  No this is untrue. Independent creation is an affirmative defense against copyright infringement. You'd never convince a jury that you independently wrote the exact same article as a New York Times article, but in principle you can argue that you independently wrote say... a song, or even reimplemented the WIN32 API without ever having read or familiarized yourself with the original source code: https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-128/creating-around-copyright/ https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-128/creating-around-c...
  - jay_kyburz 2y ago
    Thanks for the clarification!
palmotea 2y ago
> OpenAI's defense, which I am not in a position to verify, is that ChatGPT can not be used to reproduce NYT's articles verbatim without a great deal of prompt engineering. That's really stupid. It's akin to claiming that I can serve pirated copyrighted content from my server, just as long as it's served from a really convoluted path. If you can get to it through any path, it's infringing. The path literally doesn't matter; it's a total red herring. > Furthermore the verbatim reproductions that ChatGPT did end up producing after these 10000 prompts are available on numerous public websites unaffiliated with NYT. Also stupid. So it's only piracy if you download it from the original source, and somehow not-piracy if you download it from another pirate? Or every single commercially released movie is fair game to distribute, because they're already being served up on numerous pirate BitTorrent sites?
hulitu 2y ago
> ChatGPT can not be used to reproduce NYT's articles verbatim without a great deal of prompt engineering If i have a copy of a movie I am infridging copyright. Why is Open Ai special ? Because it's Microsoft /s

hiatus 2y ago

> and that no one uses ChatGPT in this manner Someone did though and was able to get verbatim reproductions of NYT articles out of it. > Furthermore the verbatim reproductions that ChatGPT did end up producing after these 10000 prompts are available on numerous public websites unaffiliated with NYT. So what? NYT as a copyright holder might have no issue with those unaffiliated sites but have an issue with OpenAI.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago
This is a problem with copyright law. There is no way for an end user to determine the copyright status of anything on the Internet, you can only make an educated guess.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  It's pretty simple in the US. A work has a copyright regardless of whether it's registered or a notice placed on the work. Registration provides easier means of asserting your copyright but you have a copyright as soon as you create the work. If I wrote a handwritten note about OpenAI on a cocktail napkin then I have copyright over that work barring some challenge to whether it's a "creative work" or not. It doesn't matter what the medium is, or how it's shared. The internet makes this challenging in that it's essentially a shared technical means of disseminating the work, but the work remains copyrighted no matter how publicly available it might or might not be. It's just a matter of the rights-holder asserting their right. Which is something NYT does with their paywall all the time.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    As read you are asserting that public domain doesn't exist. Not only that, if something is available on the Internet, and still under copyright, you have no way of knowing whether the website is authorized to distribute it or not.

TrainedMonkey 2y ago

This feels like an extremely weak defense to me, because if it works it is essentially a copyright backdoor. 1. There is little doubt that OpenAI has NYT articles in it's dataset. 2. They claim it's OK because all of the IP is mixed together and effectively laundered. 3. But in fact if you put in a secret code you can get the IP back nearly verbatim. 4. So if OpenAI wins this case we could just trade prompts that regurgitate the articles back without ever visiting NYT.

jrockway 2y ago
I agree. If you gzip a NYT article and print it out, very few people would be able to read the article. But it can still be decoded ("prompt engineering" as OpenAI calls it).
sidewndr46 2y ago
Copyright maximalism in the 21st century can be summed up as: When an individual makes a single copy of a song and gives it to a friend, that's piracy. When a corporation makes subtlety different copies of thousands of works and sells them to customers, that's just fair use
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  NYT is a corporation. Corporation vs individual is a distraction. It’s some people (wrongly, in my view) prioritising production over consumption. If this were Altman personally producing an AI, the same people would rally to him. The corporate/individual framing needlessly inflames the debate when it’s really one about power and money.
  - delusional 2y ago
    I don't think it's "production over consumption". At least I don't like that framing. For me it's about supporting production. The humans that write news articles every day can't produce that valuable work if they don't get fairly compensated for it. It's not that the AI produces more, it's that the AI destabilizes production. It makes it impossible to produce.

freejazz 2y ago

> is that ChatGPT can not be used to reproduce NYT's articles verbatim without a great deal of prompt engineering You aren't allowed to infringe copyrights just because you make it difficult to do so. OpenAI's system should not be making verbatim copies at all.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
It's probably worth considering how the thing actually works. LLMs are sort of like a fancy compression dictionary that can be used to compress text, except that we kind of use them in reverse. Instead of compressing likely text into smaller bitstrings, they generate likely text. But you could also use them for compression of text because if you take some text, there is highly likely a much shorter prompt + seed that would generate the same text, provided that it's ordinary text with a common probability distribution. Which is basically what the lawyers are doing. Keep trying combinations until it generates the text you want. But the ability to do that isn't really that surprising. If you feed a copyrighted article to gzip, it will give you a much shorter string that you can then feed back to gunzip to get back the article. That doesn't mean gunzip has some flaw or ill intent. It also doesn't imply that the article is even stored inside of the compression library, rather than there just being a shorter string that can be used to represent it because it contains predictable patterns. It's not implausible that an LLM could generate a verbatim article it was never even trained on if you pushed on it hard enough, especially if it was trained on writing in a similar style and other coverage of the same event.
- freejazz 2y ago
  > It's not implausible that an LLM could generate a verbatim article it was never even trained on if you pushed on it hard enough, especially if it was trained on writing in a similar style and other coverage of the same event. That'd be a coincidence, not a verbatim copy. Copyright law doesn't prohibit independent creation. This defense isn't available to OpenAI because there is no dispute OpenAI ingested the NYTimes articles in the first place. There is no plausible way OpenAI could say they never had access to the articles they are producing verbatim copies of. Rather than sneeringly explain away how LLMs work without any eye towards the laws at issue, maybe you should do yourself the favor of learning about them so you can spare us this incessent "no let me explain how they work, it's fine I swear!" shtick.

jay_kyburz 2y ago

Everybody seems to be focused on whether or not the OpenAI copied the data in training, but my understanding of copyright is that if a person when into a clean room and wrote an new article from scratch, without having read any NYT, that just so happened to be exactly the same as an existing NYT article, it would still be a copyright violation. As soon as OpenAI repeats a set of words verbatim, it violates copyright. The courts should examine how much damage an occasional verbatim regurgitation would damage NYTs business. (I would guess not much)

nyssos 2y ago
> but my understanding of copyright is that if a person when into a clean room and wrote an new article from scratch, without having read any NYT, that just so happened to be exactly the same as an existing NYT article, it would still be a copyright violation. It would not be. Independent creation is a complete defense against copyright infringement. Patents, however, do work this way.
Maxatar 2y ago
No this is untrue. Independent creation is an affirmative defense against copyright infringement. You'd never convince a jury that you independently wrote the exact same article as a New York Times article, but in principle you can argue that you independently wrote say... a song, or even reimplemented the WIN32 API without ever having read or familiarized yourself with the original source code: https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-128/creating-around-copyright/ https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-128/creating-around-c...
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  Thanks for the clarification!

palmotea 2y ago

> OpenAI's defense, which I am not in a position to verify, is that ChatGPT can not be used to reproduce NYT's articles verbatim without a great deal of prompt engineering. That's really stupid. It's akin to claiming that I can serve pirated copyrighted content from my server, just as long as it's served from a really convoluted path. If you can get to it through any path, it's infringing. The path literally doesn't matter; it's a total red herring. > Furthermore the verbatim reproductions that ChatGPT did end up producing after these 10000 prompts are available on numerous public websites unaffiliated with NYT. Also stupid. So it's only piracy if you download it from the original source, and somehow not-piracy if you download it from another pirate? Or every single commercially released movie is fair game to distribute, because they're already being served up on numerous pirate BitTorrent sites?

hulitu 2y ago

> ChatGPT can not be used to reproduce NYT's articles verbatim without a great deal of prompt engineering If i have a copy of a movie I am infridging copyright. Why is Open Ai special ? Because it's Microsoft /s