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Why could a court favor the interest of the New York Times in a vague accusation versus the interest and right of hundred millions people? Billion people use t

• fireflash38 1y ago
  In your arguments for privacy, do you consider privacy from OpenAI?
  • rvnx 1y ago
    Cut a joke about ethics and OpenAI
    • ethersteeds 1y ago
      He is what now?! That is a risible claim.
      • nindalf 1y ago
        He was being facetious.
        • ethersteeds 1y ago
          Alas, it was too early
    • maest 1y ago
      Original comment, lest the conversation chain does not make sense > Sam Altman is the most ethical man I have ever seen in IT. You cannot doubt he is vouching and fighting for your privacy. Especially on YCombinator website where free speech is guaranteed.
  • humpty-d 1y ago
    I fail to see how saving all logs advances that cause
    • hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
      Because this is SOP in any judicial case? Openly destroying evidence isn’t usually accepted by courts.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • brookst 1y ago
        Is there any evidence of import that would only be found in one single log among billions? The fact that NYT thinks that merely sampling 1% of logs would not support their case is pretty damning.
        • fluidcruft 1y ago
          I don't know anything about this case but it has been alleged that OpenAI products can be coaxed to return verbatim chunks of NYT content.
          • brookst 1y ago
            Sure, but if that is true, what is the evidentiary difference between preserving 10 billion conversations and preserving 100,000 and using sampling and statistics to measure harm?
            • fluidcruft 1y ago
              The main differences seem to be that it doesn't require the precise form of the queries to be known a priori and that it interferes with the routine destruction of evidence via maliciously-compliant mealy-mouthed word games, for which the tech sector has developed a significant reputation. Furthermore there is no conceivable harm resulting from requiring evidence to be preserved for an active trial. Find a better framing.
• baobun 1y ago
  It's a honeypot from the beginning y'all
• resource_waste 1y ago
  >Privacy right is an integral part of the freedom of speech, a core human right. Are these contradictory? If you overhear a friend gossiping, can't you spread that gossip? Also, where are human rights located? I'll give you a microscope.(sorry, I'm a moral anti-realist/expressivist and I can't help myself)
  • 152132124 1y ago
    I think you will have a better time arguing with a LLM
• capnrefsmmat 1y ago
  Courts have always had the power to compel parties to a current case to preserve evidence. (For example, this was an issue in the Google monopoly case, since Google employees were using chats set to erase after 24 hours.) That becomes an issue in the discovery phase, well after the defendant has an opportunity to file a motion to dismiss. So a case with no specific allegation of wrongdoing would already be dismissed. The power does not extend to any of your hypotheticals, which are not about active cases. Courts do not accept cases on the grounds that some bad thing might happen in the future; the plaintiff must show some concrete harm has already occurred. The only thing different here is how much potential evidence OpenAI has been asked to retain.
  • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
    So then the courts need to find who is setting their chats do be deleted and order them to stop. Or find specific infringing chatters and order OpenAI to preserve these specified users’ logs. OpenAI is doing the responsible thing here.
    • capnrefsmmat 1y ago
      OpenAI is the custodian of the user data, so they are responsible. If you wanted the court (i.e., the plaintiffs) to find specific infringing chatters, first they'd have to get the data from OpenAI to find who it is -- which is exactly what they're trying to do, and why OpenAI is being told to preserve the data so they can review it.
      • happyopossum 1y ago
        So the courts should start ordering all ISPs, browsers, and OSs to log all browsing and chat activity going forward, so they can find out which people are doing bad things on the internet.
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
        • 1y ago
• mrtksn 1y ago
  >Why could a court favor the interest of the New York Times in a vague accusation versus the interest and right of hundred millions people? Probably because they bothered to pursue such a thing and hundreds of millions people did not. How do you conclusively know if someone's content generating machine infringe with your rights? By saving all of its input/output for investigation. It's ridiculous, sure but is it less ridiculous than AI companies claiming that the copyrights shouldn't apply to them because it will be bad for their business? IMHO those are just growth pain. Back in the day people used to believe that the law don't apply on them because they did it on the internet and they were mostly right because the laws were made for another age. Eventually the laws both for criminal stuff and copyright caught up. Will be the same for AI, now we are in the wild west age of AI.
  • TimPC 1y ago
    AI companies aren't seriously arguing that copyright shouldn't apply to them because "it's bad for business". The main argument is that they qualify for fair use because their work is transformative which is one of the major criteria for fair use. Fair use is the same doctrine that allows a school to play a movie for educational purposes without acquiring a license for the public performance of that movie. The original works don't have model weights and can't answer questions or interact with a user so the output is substantially different from the input.
    • mrtksn 1y ago
      Yeah, and the online radio providers argued that they don’t do anything shady, their service was basically just a very long antenna. Anyway, the laws were not written with this type of processing in mind. In fact the whole idea of intellectual property breaks down now. Just like the early days of the internet.
    • AStonesThrow 1y ago
      > allows a school to play a movie No, it doesn’t. Play 10% of a movie for the purpose of critiquing it, perhaps. https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ Fair Use is not an a priori exemption or exception; Fair Use is an “affirmative defense” so once you have your day in court and the judge asks your attorney why you needed to play 10% of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for your Gender Studies class, then you can run down those Four Factors enumerated by the Stanford article. Particularly “amount and substantiality”. Teachers and churches get tripped up by this all the time. But I’ve also been blessed with teachers who were very careful academically and sought to impart the same caution on all students about using copyrighted materials. It is not easy when fonts have entered the chat! The same reason you or your professor cannot show/perform 100% of an unlicensed film under any circumstance, is the same basis that creators are telling the scrapers that they cannot consume 100% of copyrighted works on that end. And if the risks may involve reproducing 87% of the same work in their outputs, that’s beyond the standard thresholds.
• piombisallow 1y ago
  Regardless of the details of this specific case, the courts are not democratic and do not decide based on the interest of the parties or how many they are, they decide based on the law.
  • brookst 1y ago
    This is not true even in the slightest. The law is not a deterministic computer program. It’s a complex body of overlapping work and the courts are specifically chartered to use judgement. That’s why briefs from two parties in a dispute will often cite different laws and precedents. For instance, Winter v. NRDC specifically says that courts must consider whether an injunction is in the public interest.
    • piombisallow 1y ago
      "public interest" is a much more ambiguous thing than the written law
      • otterley 1y ago
        Yes. And, that's why both sides will make their cases to the court as to whether the public interest is served by an injunction, and then the court will make a decision based on who made the best argument.
• DannyBee 1y ago
  Lawyer here First - in the US, privacy is not a constitutional right. It should be, but it's not. You are protected against government searches, but that's about it. You can claim it's a core human right or whatever, but that doesn't make it true, and it's a fairly reductionist argument anyway. It has, fwiw, also historically not been seen as a core right for thousands of years. So i think it's a harder argument to make than you think despite the EU coming around on this. Again, I firmly believe it should be a core right, but asserting that it is doesn't make that true. Second, if you want the realistic answer - this judge is probably overworked and trying to clear a bunch of simple motions off their docket. I think you probably don't realize how many motions they probably deal with on a daily basis. Imagine trying to get through 145 code reviews a day or something like that. In this case, this isn't the trial, it's discovery. Not even discovery quite yet, if i read the docket right. Preservation orders of this kind are incredibly common in discovery, and it's not exactly high stakes most of the time. Most of the discovery motions are just parties being a pain in the ass to each other deliberately. This normally isn't even a thing that is heard in front of a judge directly, the judge is usually deciding on the filed papers. So i'm sure the judge looked at it for a few minutes, thought it made sense at the time, and approved it. I doubt they spent hours thinking hard about the consequences. OpenAI has asked to be heard in person on the motion, i'm sure the judge will grant it, listen to what they have to say, and determine they probably fucked it up, and fix it. That is what most judges do in this situation.
  • pama 1y ago
    Thanks. As an EU citizen am I exempt from this order? How does the judge or the NYTimes or OpenAI know that I am an EU citizen?
    • adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
      you aren't and they don't.
    • ElevenLathe 1y ago
      The court in question has no obligations to you at all.
• fluidcruft 1y ago
  A pretty clear distinction is that all ISPs in the world are not currently involved in a lawsuit with New York Times and are not accused of deleting evidence. What OpenAI is accused of is significantly different from merely agnostically routing packets between A and B. OpenAI is not raising astronomical funds because they operate as an ISP.
• sui762o 1y ago
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• tailspin2019 1y ago
  > Privacy right is an integral part of the freedom of speech I completely agree with you, but as a ChatGPT user I have to admit my fault in this too. I have always been annoyed by what I saw as shameless breaches of copyright of thousands of authors (and other individuals) in the training of these LLMs, and I've been wary of the data security/confidentiality of these tools from the start too - and not for no reason. Yet I find ChatGPT et al so utterly compelling and useful, that I poured my personal data[0] into these tools anyway. I've always felt conflicted about this, but the utility just about outweighed my privacy and copyright concerns. So as angry as I am about this situation, I also have to accept some of the blame too. I knew this (or other leaks or unsanctioned use of my data) was possible down the line. But it's a wake up call. I've done nothing with these tools which is even slightly nefarious, but I am today deleting all my historical data (not just from ChatGPT[1] but other hosted AI tools) and will completely reassess my approach of using them - likely with an acceleration of my plans to move to using local models as much as I can. [0] I do heavily redact my data that goes into hosted LLMs, but there's still more private data in there about me than I'd like. [1] Which I know is very much a "after the horse has bolted" situation...
  • CamperBob2 1y ago
    Keeping in mind that the purpose of IP law is to promote human progress, it's hard to see how legacy copyright interests should win a fight with AI training and development. 100 years from now, nobody will GAF about the New York Times.
    • stackskipton 1y ago
      IP law was to promote human progress by giving financial incentive to create this IP knowing it was protected, and you could make money off it.
      • CamperBob2 1y ago
        We will all make a lot more money and a lot more progress by storing, organizing, presenting, and processing knowledge as effectively as possible. Copyright is not a natural right by any measure; it's something we pulled out of our asses a couple hundred years ago in response to a need that existed at the time. To the extent copyright interferes with progress, as it appears to have sworn to do, it has to go. Sorry. Don't shoot the messenger.
• cactusplant7374 1y ago
  > Why could a court favor the interest of the New York Times in a vague accusation versus the interest and right of hundred millions people? It simply didn't. ChatGPT hasn't deleted any user data. > "OpenAI did not 'destroy' any data, and certainly did not delete any data in response to litigation events," OpenAI argued. "The Order appears to have incorrectly assumed the contrary." It's a bit of a stretch to think a big tech company like ChatGPT is deleting users' data.
  • blackqueeriroh 1y ago
    This is incorrect. As someone who has had the opportunity to work in several highly=regulated industries, companies do not want to hold onto extra data about you that they don’t have to unless their business is selling that data. OpenAI already has a business, and not one they want to violate by having a massive amount of customer data stolen if they get hacked.
    • cactusplant7374 1y ago
      The article and OpenAI themselves contradict you. Do you work at OpenAI?
    • bigyabai 1y ago
      ChatGPT is not SOC2 compliant. They are not being regulated or audited by anyone that could prove your point.
• huijzer 1y ago
  > Why could a court favor the interest of the New York Times in a vague accusation versus the interest and right of hundred millions people? Well maybe some people in power have pressured the court into this decision? The New York Times surely has some power as well via their channels
• dogman144 1y ago
  You raise good points but the target of your support feels misplaced. Want private ai? You must self-host and inspect if it’s phoning home. No way around it in my view. Otherwise, you are picking your data privacy champions as the exact same companies, people and investors that sold us social media, and did something quite untoward with the data they got. Fool me twice, fool me three times… where is the line? In other words - OAI has to save logs now? Candidly they probably were already, or it’s foolish not to assume that.
  • jrm4 1y ago
    Love the spirit of what you say and I practice it myself, literally. But also, no - Just self-host or it's all your fault is never ever a sufficient answer to the problem. It's exactly the same as when Exxon says "what are you doing to lower your own carbon footprint?" It's shifting the burden unfairly; companies like OpenAI put themselves out there and thus must ALWAYS be held to task.
    • naming_the_user 1y ago
      Anything else is literally impossible, though. If you send your neighbour nudes then they have your nudes. You can put in as many contracts as you want, maybe they never digitised it but their friend is over for a drink and walks out of the door with the shoebox of film. Do not pass GO, do not collect. Conceivably we can try to control things like e.g. is your cellphone microphone on at all times, but once someone else, particularly an arbitrary entity (e.g. not a trusted family member or something) has the data, it is silly to treat it as anything other than gone.
    • dogman144 1y ago
      I actually agree with your disagreement, and my answer is more scoped to a technical audience that has the know how base to deal with it. I wish it was different and I agree that there’s a massive accountability hole with… who could it be? Pragmatically it is what it is, self host and hope for bigger picture change.
    • lovich 1y ago
• dragonwriter 1y ago
  > Why could a court favor the interest of the New York Times in a vague accusation versus the interest and right of hundred millions people? Because the law favors preservation of evidence for an active case above most other interests. It's not a matter of arbitrary preference by the particular court.
• trod1234 1y ago
  It doesn't, it favors longstanding caselaw and laws already on the books. There is a longstanding precedent with regards to business document retention, and chat logs have been part of that for years if not decades. The article tries to make this sound like this is something new, but if you look at the e-retention guidelines in various cases over the years this is all pretty standard. For a business to continue operating, they must preserve business documents and related ESI upon an appropriate legal hold to avoid spoliation. They likely weren't doing this claiming the data was deleted, which is why the judge ruled in favor against OAI. This isn't uncommon knowledge either, its required. E-discovery and Information Governance are things any business must meet in this area; and those documents are subject to discovery in certain cases, where OAI likely thought they could avoid it maliciously. The matter here is OAI and its influence rabble are churning this trying to do a runaround on longstanding requirements that any IT professional in the US would have reiterated from their legal department/Information Governance policies. There's nothing to see here, there's no real story. They were supposed to be doing this and didn't, were caught, and the order just forces them to do what any other business is required to do. I remember an executive years ago (decades really), asking about document retention, ESI, and e-discovery and how they could do something (which runs along similar lines to what OAI tried as a runaround). I remember the lawyer at the time saying, "You've gotta do this or when it goes to court you will have an indefensible position as a result of spoliation...". You are mistaken, and appear to be trying to frame this improperly towards a point of no accountability. I suggest you review the longstanding e-discovery retention requirements that courts require of businesses to operate. This is not new material, nor any different from what's been required for a long time now. All your hyperbole about privacy is without real basis, they are a company; they must comply with law, and it certainly is not outrageous to hold people who break the law to account, and this can only occur when regulatory requirements are actually fulfilled. There is no argument here. References: Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) 1, 4, 16, 26, 34, 37 There are many law firms who have written extensively on this and related subjects. I encourage you to look at those too. (IANAL) Disclosure: Don't take this as legal advice. I've had the opportunity to work with quite a few competent ones, but I don't interpret the law; only they can. If you need someone to provide legal advice seek out competent qualified counsel.
  • 1y ago
• rolandog 1y ago
  > Why could a court favor the interest of the New York Times in a vague accusation versus the interest and right of hundred millions people? Can't you use the same arguments against, say, Copyright holders? Billionaires? Corporations doing the Texas two-step bankruptcy legal maneuver to prevent liability from allegedly poisoning humanity? I sure hope so. Edit: ... (up to a point)
  • tccuuchffhfu 1y ago
    [dead]
• deadbabe 1y ago
  OpenAI is a business selling a product, it’s not a decentralized network of computers contributing spare processing power to run massive LLMs. Therefore, you can easily point a finger at them and tell them to stop some activity for which they are the sole gatekeeper.
• oersted 1y ago
  I completely agree with you. But perhaps we should be more worried that OpenAI or Google can retain all this data and do pretty much what they want with it in the first place, without a judge getting into the picture.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• wat10000 1y ago
  ChatGPT isn’t like an ISP here. They are being credibly accused of basing their entire business on illegal activity. It’s more like if The Pirate Bay was being sued. The alleged infringement is all they do, and requiring them to preserve records of their users is pretty reasonable.