4 ms·
I'd say there's some merit to that defense. Imagine for example if a website generated itself based on a sequence in Pi - technically all of the NYT is in that
by DSMan195276 2y ago
I'd say there's some merit to that defense. Imagine for example if a website generated itself based on a sequence in Pi - technically all of the NYT is in that 'dataset' and if you tell it to start at the right digit it will spit back any NYT article. In a more realistic sense though you can make it spit back anything you want and the NYT article is just a consequence of that behavior - finding the right 'secret code' to get a verbatim article is not something you can easily just do.
ChatGPT is somewhere in-between - You can't just ask it for a specific NYT article and have it spit it back at you verbatim (NYT acknowledges as such, it took them ~10k prompts to do it), but with enough hints and guesses you can coax it into producing one (along with pretty much anything else you want). The question then becomes whether that's closer to the Pi example (ChatGPT is basically just spitting the prompt back at you), or if it's easy enough to do that it similar to ChatGPT just hosting the article.
Edit: I suppose I'd add, this is also a separate question from the training, training on copyrighted material may or may not be legal regardless of whether the model can verbatim spit the training material back out.
- throwway120385 2y agoI think the difference here is that a human intentionally built a dataset containing that information, whereas Pi is an irrational number which is a consequence of our mathematics and number system and wasn't intentionally crafted to give you NYT articles.
- DSMan195276 2y agoWell that depends on what you're trying to prove. If you think it's a copyright violation to include the articles in the dataset _at all_ then it doesn't even matter if ChatGPT can produce NYT articles, it's a violation either way. If including the articles in the dataset is not in-and-of-itself a copyright violation then things get complicated when talking about what prompt is required to produce a copyright-violating result.
- delusional 2y agoYou're getting lost in the technology here. Copyright is not about producing the exact sequence of bytes, nor is it about "hosting an article". Copyright is an intellectual property right to the creative work, not the exact reproduction that is seen on some website, but the creative work itself. The law doesn't not care about your weird edge cases. What matters is what should be and how we can make it so.
- DSMan195276 2y agoYou're ignoring the point of what I'm saying though, which is that the required prompt is relevant to determining if ChatGPT itself is the thing violating the copyright. I can probably get ChatGPT to produce any sequence of tokens I want given enough time, that doesn't mean ChatGPT is violating every copyright in existence, somewhere you have to draw the line.
- stonogo 2y agoThe difference between "I can probably generate everything" and "I can definitely produce this copyrighted work" is substantial and in fact the core argument in the case.
- DSMan195276 2y agoCan you really say it can "definitely produce this copyrighted work" if NYT had to try thousands of prompts, some of which included parts of the articles they wanted it to produce? That's my point. I really don't know the answer, but it's not as simple as "they asked it to to produce the article and it did", they tested thousands of combinations.
- freejazz 2y agoDid it? Then yes. You can say it "definitely produce this copyrighted work" I'm not sure how that could even be controversial. Either it does or doesn't. In this case, it does.