5 ms·

I am curious what happens if they call their bluff on this and cut off ChatGPT in Germany. Not that I think OpenAI is doing the right thing, just, I don’t think

I am curious what happens if they call their bluff on this and cut off ChatGPT in Germany. Not that I think OpenAI is doing the right thing, just, I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace.

gmerc 1y ago
In curious why you think the rule of law is a bluff.
- burnished 1y ago
  Probably pattern recognition
- petesergeant 1y ago
  I come from the country with the world’s oldest continuous parliament, and they change the law all the time. Arguably that’s all the majority of politicians do.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
aniviacat 1y ago
Claude and Gemini would become more popular.
pavlov 1y ago
There are many competing providers of commercial LLMs with equal capabilities, so another vendor would probably be happy to serve a leading Western market of 83 million people.
- petesergeant 1y ago
  Yeah? Which commercial provider’s model do you think was trained without using lyrics?
  - aniviacat 1y ago
    I would imagine providers who want to comply will scan the LLM's output and pay a license fee to the owner if it contains lyrics.
    - petesergeant 1y ago
      They scan for commercial work already. Isn’t the law about training, not output?
      - aniviacat 1y ago
        Perhaps; I didn't read the court ruling. But I'd be surprised if that was generally the case. It's easy to see why ChatGPT 1:1 reproducing a song's lyrics would be a copyright issue. But creating a derivative work based on the song? What if I made a website that counts the number of alliterations in certain songs' lyrics? Would that be copyright infringement, because my algorithm uses the original lyrics to derive its output? If this ruling really applied to any alogrithm deriving content from copyright protected works, it would be pretty absurd. But absurd copyright laws would be nothing new, so I won't discount the possibility.
        dathinab 1y ago
        > But creating a derivative work based on the song? 1. it wouldn't matter as derivative work still needs the original license 2. expect if it's not derivative but just inspired, and the court case was about it being pretty much _the same work_ OpenAIs defense also wasn't that it's derived or inspired but, to quote > Since the output would only be generated as a result of user inputs known as prompts, it was not the defendants, but the respective user who would be liable for it, OpenAI had argued. and the court oder said more or less - if it can reproduce the song lyrics it means it stored a copy of the song lyrics somehow somewhere (memorization), but storing copies requires a license and OpenAI has no license - it it outputs a copy of the song lyrics it means it's making another copy of them and giving them to the user which is copyright infringement and this makes sens, if a human memorizes a song and then writes it down when asked it's still is and always has been copyright infringement (else you could just launder copy right by hiring people to memorize things and then write them down, which would be ridiculous). and technically speaking LLMs are at the core a lossy compressed storage of their training content + statistic models about them. And to be clear that isn't some absurd around five corners reasoning. It's a pretty core aspect of their design. And to be clear this are things well know even before LLMs became a big deal and OpenAI got huge investment. OpenAI pretty much knew about this being a problem from the get to go. But like any recent big US "startup" following the law doesn't matter. it technically being a unusual form of lossy compressed storage means it makes that the memorization counts as a copyright infringement (with current law) but I would argue the law should be improved in that case, so that under some circumstances "memorization" in LLMs is treated as "memorization" in Humans (i.e. not a illegal copy, until you make it one by writing it down). But you can't make it all circumstances because like mentioned you can use the same tech to bascially to lossy file compression and you don't want people to launder copy right by training an LLM on a a single text/song/movie and then distributing that...
beezlewax 1y ago
This assumes that tech companies can act above the law because they've got a new feature to jam down our throats. Have you considered that not everyone wants that? Or that it might not be the best thing?
- petesergeant 1y ago
  > Have you considered that not everyone wants that? Or that it might not be the best thing? Did I suggest either of those things?
barrucadu 1y ago
> I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace They're not saying no LLMs, they're saying no LLMs using lyrics without a license. OpenAI simply need to pay for a license, or train an LLM without using lyrics.
- Myrmornis 1y ago
  But lyrics are just one example. Are you saying that training experiments must filter out all substrings from the training input that bear too close a resemblance to a substring of a copyrighted work?
  - barrucadu 1y ago
    Obviously there's a limit, reproducing a single sentence is unlikely to be copyright infringement just because there are only so many words in a language; but if reproducing some text would be copyright infringement if a human did it, I don't see why LLM companies should get a free pass. If it's really essential that they train their models on song lyrics, or books, or movie scripts, or articles, or whatever, they should pay license fees.
  - freejazz 1y ago
    At some point, use of the lyrics becomes de minimis
- luke5441 1y ago
  This obviously applies to all copyrighted works. I could sue OpenAI when it reproduces my source code that I published on the Internet. They already "filter" the code to prevent it from happening (reproducing exact works). My guess it is just superficially changing things around so it is harder to prove copyright violations.
- akersten 1y ago
  Oi, you got a loisense to read those words and then repeat them back to me when asked?
pjc50 1y ago
Conversely, last week we had Spain being willing to cut off Cloudflare (!) to protect football match royalties. > I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace. Counter-argument: can any country's government justify allowing its population and businesses to become completely dependent on an overseas company which does not comply with its laws? (For Americans, think "China" in this case)
mrweasel 1y ago
There are 80 million Germans. If you where OpenAI, or it's shareholders, would you leave that market open for a competitor? No, you'd make a version of your product without the lyrics. More EU countries are going to follow and reach the same conclusion, especially now that Germany has set a legal precedence. Should OpenAI just pull out of a market with 500 million people and leave it to Claude, Perplexity or someone else entirely? It doesn't appear that modern LLMs are really that hard to build, expensive perhaps, but if you have monopoly on a large enough market, price isn't really your main concern.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  > More EU countries are going to follow and reach the same conclusion, especially now that Germany has set a legal precedence. That's not how laws and regulations work in European or even EU countries. Courts/the legal system in Germany can not set legal precedents for other countries, and countries don't use legal precedents from other countries, as they obviously have different laws. It could be cited as an authority, but no one is obligated to follow that. What could happen for example, would be that EU law is interpreted through the CJEU (Court of Justice of the European Union), and its rulings bind EU member states, but that's outside of what individual countries do. Sidenote, I'm not a English native speaker, but I think it's "precedent", not "precedence", similar words but the first one is specifically what I think you meant.
  - mrweasel 1y ago
    > I think it's "precedent", not "precedence", I think you're right, also not native English speaker. No, you're right that a German can't influence e.g. the similar lawsuit against Suno in Denmark, but as you point out, it can, and most likely will be cited, and I think it's often the case that this carries a lot of weight.
  - dathinab 1y ago
    > That's not how laws and regulations work in European or even EU countries yes, even if just looking at other court cases in Germany the role of precedent is "in general" not quite as powerful (as Courts are supposed to follow what the law says not what other courts say). To be clear this is quite a bit oversimplified. Other court ruling does still matter in practice, especially if it is from higher courts. But it's very different to how it is commonly presented to work in the US (can't say if it actually works that way). but also EU member states do synchronize the general working of many laws to make a unified marked practically possible and this does include the general way copy right works (by implementing different country specific laws which all follow the same general framework, so details can differ) and the parts which are the same are pretty clear about that - if you distribute a copy of something it's a copy right violation no matter the technical details a human memorizing the content and then reproducing it would still make it a copy right infringement, so it should be pretty obvious that this applies to LLMs to, where you potentially could even argue that it's not just "memorizing it" but storing it compressed and a bit lossy.... and that honestly isn't just the case in the Germany, or the EU, the main reason AI companies got mostly away with it so far is due to judges being pressured to rule leniently as "it's the future of humanity", "the country wouldn't be able to compete" etc. etc. Or in other words corruption (as politicians are supposed to change laws if things change not tell judges to not do their job properly).
dathinab 1y ago
first due to how the EU unified marked works they would have to cut it from all of the EU not just Germany second it probably would be good for the EU and even US as it would de-monopolize the market a bit before that becomes fully impossible
lvncelot 1y ago
> cut off ChatGPT in Germany God I can only hope
techblueberry 1y ago
German student performance will plateau, while all other countries slowly decline.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  AI is actively harming kids' abilities while inflating their grades when they make AI do their homework. German student performance may plateau, but when student performance in other countries falls, that still leaves them in a better place.
krick 1y ago
[dead]

gmerc 1y ago

In curious why you think the rule of law is a bluff.

burnished 1y ago
Probably pattern recognition
petesergeant 1y ago
I come from the country with the world’s oldest continuous parliament, and they change the law all the time. Arguably that’s all the majority of politicians do.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

aniviacat 1y ago

Claude and Gemini would become more popular.

pavlov 1y ago

There are many competing providers of commercial LLMs with equal capabilities, so another vendor would probably be happy to serve a leading Western market of 83 million people.

petesergeant 1y ago
Yeah? Which commercial provider’s model do you think was trained without using lyrics?
- aniviacat 1y ago
  I would imagine providers who want to comply will scan the LLM's output and pay a license fee to the owner if it contains lyrics.
  - petesergeant 1y ago
    They scan for commercial work already. Isn’t the law about training, not output?
    - aniviacat 1y ago
      Perhaps; I didn't read the court ruling. But I'd be surprised if that was generally the case. It's easy to see why ChatGPT 1:1 reproducing a song's lyrics would be a copyright issue. But creating a derivative work based on the song? What if I made a website that counts the number of alliterations in certain songs' lyrics? Would that be copyright infringement, because my algorithm uses the original lyrics to derive its output? If this ruling really applied to any alogrithm deriving content from copyright protected works, it would be pretty absurd. But absurd copyright laws would be nothing new, so I won't discount the possibility.
      - dathinab 1y ago
        > But creating a derivative work based on the song? 1. it wouldn't matter as derivative work still needs the original license 2. expect if it's not derivative but just inspired, and the court case was about it being pretty much _the same work_ OpenAIs defense also wasn't that it's derived or inspired but, to quote > Since the output would only be generated as a result of user inputs known as prompts, it was not the defendants, but the respective user who would be liable for it, OpenAI had argued. and the court oder said more or less - if it can reproduce the song lyrics it means it stored a copy of the song lyrics somehow somewhere (memorization), but storing copies requires a license and OpenAI has no license - it it outputs a copy of the song lyrics it means it's making another copy of them and giving them to the user which is copyright infringement and this makes sens, if a human memorizes a song and then writes it down when asked it's still is and always has been copyright infringement (else you could just launder copy right by hiring people to memorize things and then write them down, which would be ridiculous). and technically speaking LLMs are at the core a lossy compressed storage of their training content + statistic models about them. And to be clear that isn't some absurd around five corners reasoning. It's a pretty core aspect of their design. And to be clear this are things well know even before LLMs became a big deal and OpenAI got huge investment. OpenAI pretty much knew about this being a problem from the get to go. But like any recent big US "startup" following the law doesn't matter. it technically being a unusual form of lossy compressed storage means it makes that the memorization counts as a copyright infringement (with current law) but I would argue the law should be improved in that case, so that under some circumstances "memorization" in LLMs is treated as "memorization" in Humans (i.e. not a illegal copy, until you make it one by writing it down). But you can't make it all circumstances because like mentioned you can use the same tech to bascially to lossy file compression and you don't want people to launder copy right by training an LLM on a a single text/song/movie and then distributing that...

beezlewax 1y ago

This assumes that tech companies can act above the law because they've got a new feature to jam down our throats. Have you considered that not everyone wants that? Or that it might not be the best thing?

petesergeant 1y ago
> Have you considered that not everyone wants that? Or that it might not be the best thing? Did I suggest either of those things?

barrucadu 1y ago

> I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace They're not saying no LLMs, they're saying no LLMs using lyrics without a license. OpenAI simply need to pay for a license, or train an LLM without using lyrics.

Myrmornis 1y ago
But lyrics are just one example. Are you saying that training experiments must filter out all substrings from the training input that bear too close a resemblance to a substring of a copyrighted work?
- barrucadu 1y ago
  Obviously there's a limit, reproducing a single sentence is unlikely to be copyright infringement just because there are only so many words in a language; but if reproducing some text would be copyright infringement if a human did it, I don't see why LLM companies should get a free pass. If it's really essential that they train their models on song lyrics, or books, or movie scripts, or articles, or whatever, they should pay license fees.
- freejazz 1y ago
  At some point, use of the lyrics becomes de minimis
luke5441 1y ago
This obviously applies to all copyrighted works. I could sue OpenAI when it reproduces my source code that I published on the Internet. They already "filter" the code to prevent it from happening (reproducing exact works). My guess it is just superficially changing things around so it is harder to prove copyright violations.
akersten 1y ago
Oi, you got a loisense to read those words and then repeat them back to me when asked?

pjc50 1y ago

Conversely, last week we had Spain being willing to cut off Cloudflare (!) to protect football match royalties. > I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace. Counter-argument: can any country's government justify allowing its population and businesses to become completely dependent on an overseas company which does not comply with its laws? (For Americans, think "China" in this case)

mrweasel 1y ago

There are 80 million Germans. If you where OpenAI, or it's shareholders, would you leave that market open for a competitor? No, you'd make a version of your product without the lyrics. More EU countries are going to follow and reach the same conclusion, especially now that Germany has set a legal precedence. Should OpenAI just pull out of a market with 500 million people and leave it to Claude, Perplexity or someone else entirely? It doesn't appear that modern LLMs are really that hard to build, expensive perhaps, but if you have monopoly on a large enough market, price isn't really your main concern.

embedding-shape 1y ago
> More EU countries are going to follow and reach the same conclusion, especially now that Germany has set a legal precedence. That's not how laws and regulations work in European or even EU countries. Courts/the legal system in Germany can not set legal precedents for other countries, and countries don't use legal precedents from other countries, as they obviously have different laws. It could be cited as an authority, but no one is obligated to follow that. What could happen for example, would be that EU law is interpreted through the CJEU (Court of Justice of the European Union), and its rulings bind EU member states, but that's outside of what individual countries do. Sidenote, I'm not a English native speaker, but I think it's "precedent", not "precedence", similar words but the first one is specifically what I think you meant.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  > I think it's "precedent", not "precedence", I think you're right, also not native English speaker. No, you're right that a German can't influence e.g. the similar lawsuit against Suno in Denmark, but as you point out, it can, and most likely will be cited, and I think it's often the case that this carries a lot of weight.
- dathinab 1y ago
  > That's not how laws and regulations work in European or even EU countries yes, even if just looking at other court cases in Germany the role of precedent is "in general" not quite as powerful (as Courts are supposed to follow what the law says not what other courts say). To be clear this is quite a bit oversimplified. Other court ruling does still matter in practice, especially if it is from higher courts. But it's very different to how it is commonly presented to work in the US (can't say if it actually works that way). but also EU member states do synchronize the general working of many laws to make a unified marked practically possible and this does include the general way copy right works (by implementing different country specific laws which all follow the same general framework, so details can differ) and the parts which are the same are pretty clear about that - if you distribute a copy of something it's a copy right violation no matter the technical details a human memorizing the content and then reproducing it would still make it a copy right infringement, so it should be pretty obvious that this applies to LLMs to, where you potentially could even argue that it's not just "memorizing it" but storing it compressed and a bit lossy.... and that honestly isn't just the case in the Germany, or the EU, the main reason AI companies got mostly away with it so far is due to judges being pressured to rule leniently as "it's the future of humanity", "the country wouldn't be able to compete" etc. etc. Or in other words corruption (as politicians are supposed to change laws if things change not tell judges to not do their job properly).

dathinab 1y ago

first due to how the EU unified marked works they would have to cut it from all of the EU not just Germany second it probably would be good for the EU and even US as it would de-monopolize the market a bit before that becomes fully impossible

lvncelot 1y ago

> cut off ChatGPT in Germany God I can only hope

techblueberry 1y ago

German student performance will plateau, while all other countries slowly decline.

jeroenhd 1y ago
AI is actively harming kids' abilities while inflating their grades when they make AI do their homework. German student performance may plateau, but when student performance in other countries falls, that still leaves them in a better place.

krick 1y ago

[dead]