4 ms·

Aside from becoming the opposite of the values their name suggests, there’s two main mistakes OpenAI made in my view: violate copyright when training, and rush

Aside from becoming the opposite of the values their name suggests, there’s two main mistakes OpenAI made in my view: violate copyright when training, and rush to release the chatbot. Stealing original work is going to bite them legally (opening them to all sorts of lawsuits while killing their own ability to sue competitors piggy-backing off their model output, for example), and is a special case of them being generally shortsighted and passing on an opportunity to make a truly Apple- or Amazon-scale business by applying strategy and longer term thinking (even if someone else got to release an LLM chatbot before them, they could—as in, had the funds and the talent to—build something higher level, properly licensed, and much more difficult to commoditise). If this was the fault of Altman, it is understandable that certain people would want him out.

john_texas 2y ago
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Terretta 2y ago
> violate copyright when training If we could incrementally update our own brains by swapping cells for chips, what percentage of our brain has to be chips before us learning from a book is a violation of copyright? When learning to recite a recent children's poem in kindergarten, what level of accuracy can a child attain before their ability to repeat it privately to one other person at a time is a copyright violation?
- anileated 2y ago
  > If we could incrementally update our own brains by swapping cells for chips, what percentage of our brain has to be chips before us learning from a book is a violation of copyright? The same percentage at which you stop qualifying to be human and become an unthinking tool, fully controlled by its operator to do whatever they want, without free will of its own and without any ethical concerns about abuse and slavery, like is the case with all LLMs. (Of course, it is a moot point, because creating a human-level consciousness with chips is a thought experiment not grounded in reality.) > When learning to recite a recent children's poem in kindergarten, what level of accuracy can a child attain before their ability to repeat it privately to one other person at a time is a copyright violation? Any level thanks to the concept called human rights and freedoms, famously not applied to machines and other unthinking tools.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    This seems short sighted. The idea of when a "mechanical man" should be given the same rights as a man has been explored for a long time, as an echo of the past when people had the same debate about women and non-Europeans.
    - anileated 2y ago
      The ideas of FTL travel or existence of bearded people in the sky were also explored for a long time. > as an echo of the past when people had the same debate about women and non-Europeans. If you need help spotting the difference between skin color or gender variation and an imagined ability to imbue something we cannot even define (like consciousness) onto arbitrary substrates, I am not the right person for that.
    - strogonoff 2y ago
      If you think LLMs are like conscious humans and should be given the same rights, I don’t see anything wrong with it. You should realize, however, that this means the LLM industry would instantly be dead because you cannot really subject conscious humans to what LLMs are subjected to in order to be profitable.
- 3np 2y ago
  Want to abolish economic copyright alltogether? I could get behind that. Making a legal exception because of some imagined future metaphysical property of this particular platform sounds like being fooled.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    Why not abolish copyright only when it suits multi-billion corporations and leave it in place for us, ordinary people who end up providing training data so that we can be replaced at our jobs?
    - 3np 2y ago
      Abolishing economic copyright while protecting (non-transferrable) moral rights is in this direction, I believe.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  I don't think the concern is related specifically to training on computer chips with copyrighted content. If you are going to use human brain cells to memorize protected content and sell it as a product, that's still an issue based on current copyright laws.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Once again...LLMs are not massive archives of data. You would never want to use an LLM to archive your writings or documents. They are incredibly bad at this.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      They were never designed to be archives though, of course they're bad at something that not only was not a goal bit is opposite of a primary design factor. LLMs are massive, lossy compressed datasets. They were designed to store the gist of effectively all digital language content humans ever created so an inference engine could use that data space to predict what a person might say to a prompt. They were never designed to regurgitate exact copies of the original sources just use your favorite zip algorithm for that. The question would be how closely an LLM can regurgitate an answer before running into copyright issues, and how the original training dataset was obtained.
  - Terretta 2y ago
    > If you are going to use human brain cells to memorize protected content and sell it as a product, that's still an issue based on current copyright laws. And yet, that's all most billable hours at McKinsey, BCG, KPMG, are for. Those consultants memorized copyrighted stuff so your executives didn't have to. It's very difficult to explain how GPT is not consulting.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      The question there still comes down to what they did with the memorized content. There's nothing wrong with memorizing copyrighted content, there's legally a problem with trying to resell it without paying royalties under contract to the owner of the copyright.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  Others replied to this and I am still not sure what your point is. Are you saying big tech should be able to get away with this because LLMs are just like us humans?
- andai 2y ago
  This is one issue with Microsoft's Total Recall thing, right? I wonder how they're dealing with that.
bcoates 2y ago
Do the copyright claims have any legs at all? ianal, but I thought it was pretty settled that statistical compilation of copyrighted works (indexes, concordances, summaries, full-text search databases) were considered "facts" and not copies. (This would be separate from the contributory infringement claim if the model will output a copyrighted work verbatim)
- strogonoff 2y ago
  1. Google was, and still is in some developed countries, under fire for as much as summarising search results too much, so I think yes, the claims have legs. > This would be separate from the contributory infringement claim if the model will output a copyrighted work verbatim 2. Commercial for-profit models were shown to do that, and (other legal arguments aside, such as model and/or its output being a derivative work, etc.) in some cases that was precisely the smoking gun for the lawsuit, if I recall correctly. I have not seen any conclusive outcome, I suppose it will depend on jurisdiction.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    I can guarantee you if one jurisdiction limits AI training via copyright law, another one won’t, and it will have a huge competitive advantage as a result. That competitive advantage alone means you either have to leave the race or change your laws.
    - strogonoff 2y ago
      > I can guarantee you if one jurisdiction limits AI training via copyright law, another one won’t, and it will have a huge competitive advantage as a result. What is the competitive advantage of using chatbots, exactly? Any advantage from ML that I can think of comes from advanced applications that require pre-existing knowledge, like biotech, metamaterials, etc. — I fail to see how being able to use ML to cheat on a test or to avoid learning something (including command of own language) provides an advantage. — I can see how requiring an LLM trained on unlicensed work to be opened up and free for everyone to use could provide an advantage. — I can see how lack of regulation in this industry could result in a quick reduction of the number of jobs in a number of industries and therefore be a disadvantage to the economy, in the worst case benefiting a small number of for-profit corporate operators.

john_texas 2y ago

[dead]

Terretta 2y ago

> violate copyright when training If we could incrementally update our own brains by swapping cells for chips, what percentage of our brain has to be chips before us learning from a book is a violation of copyright? When learning to recite a recent children's poem in kindergarten, what level of accuracy can a child attain before their ability to repeat it privately to one other person at a time is a copyright violation?

anileated 2y ago
> If we could incrementally update our own brains by swapping cells for chips, what percentage of our brain has to be chips before us learning from a book is a violation of copyright? The same percentage at which you stop qualifying to be human and become an unthinking tool, fully controlled by its operator to do whatever they want, without free will of its own and without any ethical concerns about abuse and slavery, like is the case with all LLMs. (Of course, it is a moot point, because creating a human-level consciousness with chips is a thought experiment not grounded in reality.) > When learning to recite a recent children's poem in kindergarten, what level of accuracy can a child attain before their ability to repeat it privately to one other person at a time is a copyright violation? Any level thanks to the concept called human rights and freedoms, famously not applied to machines and other unthinking tools.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  This seems short sighted. The idea of when a "mechanical man" should be given the same rights as a man has been explored for a long time, as an echo of the past when people had the same debate about women and non-Europeans.
  - anileated 2y ago
    The ideas of FTL travel or existence of bearded people in the sky were also explored for a long time. > as an echo of the past when people had the same debate about women and non-Europeans. If you need help spotting the difference between skin color or gender variation and an imagined ability to imbue something we cannot even define (like consciousness) onto arbitrary substrates, I am not the right person for that.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    If you think LLMs are like conscious humans and should be given the same rights, I don’t see anything wrong with it. You should realize, however, that this means the LLM industry would instantly be dead because you cannot really subject conscious humans to what LLMs are subjected to in order to be profitable.
3np 2y ago
Want to abolish economic copyright alltogether? I could get behind that. Making a legal exception because of some imagined future metaphysical property of this particular platform sounds like being fooled.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  Why not abolish copyright only when it suits multi-billion corporations and leave it in place for us, ordinary people who end up providing training data so that we can be replaced at our jobs?
  - 3np 2y ago
    Abolishing economic copyright while protecting (non-transferrable) moral rights is in this direction, I believe.
_heimdall 2y ago
I don't think the concern is related specifically to training on computer chips with copyrighted content. If you are going to use human brain cells to memorize protected content and sell it as a product, that's still an issue based on current copyright laws.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Once again...LLMs are not massive archives of data. You would never want to use an LLM to archive your writings or documents. They are incredibly bad at this.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    They were never designed to be archives though, of course they're bad at something that not only was not a goal bit is opposite of a primary design factor. LLMs are massive, lossy compressed datasets. They were designed to store the gist of effectively all digital language content humans ever created so an inference engine could use that data space to predict what a person might say to a prompt. They were never designed to regurgitate exact copies of the original sources just use your favorite zip algorithm for that. The question would be how closely an LLM can regurgitate an answer before running into copyright issues, and how the original training dataset was obtained.
- Terretta 2y ago
  > If you are going to use human brain cells to memorize protected content and sell it as a product, that's still an issue based on current copyright laws. And yet, that's all most billable hours at McKinsey, BCG, KPMG, are for. Those consultants memorized copyrighted stuff so your executives didn't have to. It's very difficult to explain how GPT is not consulting.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    The question there still comes down to what they did with the memorized content. There's nothing wrong with memorizing copyrighted content, there's legally a problem with trying to resell it without paying royalties under contract to the owner of the copyright.
strogonoff 2y ago
Others replied to this and I am still not sure what your point is. Are you saying big tech should be able to get away with this because LLMs are just like us humans?
andai 2y ago
This is one issue with Microsoft's Total Recall thing, right? I wonder how they're dealing with that.

bcoates 2y ago

Do the copyright claims have any legs at all? ianal, but I thought it was pretty settled that statistical compilation of copyrighted works (indexes, concordances, summaries, full-text search databases) were considered "facts" and not copies. (This would be separate from the contributory infringement claim if the model will output a copyrighted work verbatim)

strogonoff 2y ago
1. Google was, and still is in some developed countries, under fire for as much as summarising search results too much, so I think yes, the claims have legs. > This would be separate from the contributory infringement claim if the model will output a copyrighted work verbatim 2. Commercial for-profit models were shown to do that, and (other legal arguments aside, such as model and/or its output being a derivative work, etc.) in some cases that was precisely the smoking gun for the lawsuit, if I recall correctly. I have not seen any conclusive outcome, I suppose it will depend on jurisdiction.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  I can guarantee you if one jurisdiction limits AI training via copyright law, another one won’t, and it will have a huge competitive advantage as a result. That competitive advantage alone means you either have to leave the race or change your laws.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    > I can guarantee you if one jurisdiction limits AI training via copyright law, another one won’t, and it will have a huge competitive advantage as a result. What is the competitive advantage of using chatbots, exactly? Any advantage from ML that I can think of comes from advanced applications that require pre-existing knowledge, like biotech, metamaterials, etc. — I fail to see how being able to use ML to cheat on a test or to avoid learning something (including command of own language) provides an advantage. — I can see how requiring an LLM trained on unlicensed work to be opened up and free for everyone to use could provide an advantage. — I can see how lack of regulation in this industry could result in a quick reduction of the number of jobs in a number of industries and therefore be a disadvantage to the economy, in the worst case benefiting a small number of for-profit corporate operators.