> Of course, that means that the hijacked 3rd parties are the ones footing the bill...

A bit like we are footing the bill for openai's training data.

This!

They are providing a service, we pay for it, and they reinvest in improving the service. That’s the basic business practice.

I think you missed the memo of the comment.

They were referring to the fact that everything ChatGPT is built on is other peoples work. Beyond the actual building of the model details, there is nothing that ChatGPT owns. All the content they use to train, all of the art they use to train. Everything is stolen/used without permission. Obviously there is more to it than that, because you published it on the internet. But that's a different topic.

Everything that anyone has ever built is built on the works of others. This is how we progress as a species. The entire reason why the internet is so revolutionary is that it allows for permissionless innovation.

I am in no way suggesting that it is wrong. I do however feel this level of "built upon the work of others" is different.

Right, so what's the problem with gpt4free then?

They're consuming real electricity and real time on servers that don't belong to them nor do they have permission to use.

Do you see the contradiction here ?

ChatGPT-4 is built on real peoples time.

Conveniently ignoring the ‘real electricity’ part doesn’t help your case.

Then OpenAI should allow us to do some permissionless innovation on their work.

Strangly enough, it's only interested in promoting permissionless innovation when it stands to profit. It plunders the commons, and gives nothing unencumbered back.

This litany is already getting old and it's just 2 month in.

All intellectual property is inherently stolen. Just let it go.

The reason intellectual property was invented was to encourage people to go and create new things and share them, the logic being that having a monopoly on your own work by default means you can make money from being creative and therefore people will choose to do it. The reverse is already happening, people are deciding (privately) not to publish things they have created because they rightly assume it will be stolen by an AI, monetised and used to destroy their own job. It is not merely complaining for its own sake. There is a good amount of theft and a bad amount of theft. As theft increases unchecked the amount of new output is poised to decline.

All true.

I don't see any world where it matters in the slightest. When it comes to how we deal with currently available training data nothing will change, first because of politics but also because people want the LLMs superpower more than they want to protect IP of a few individuals. And I firmly believe that no human training data that has not been produced and publishes today will play any significant role in future AI development.

We are simply too slow.

The topic's biggest cop-out. Intellectual property doesn't exist in a vacuum and our society has a social contract that says labor isn't free unless people donate it. I have limited sympathy for corporate entities like getty images, but until we implement some way to not pull the rug out from under perfectly honest independent creatives with kids and mortgages and medical bills plying their craft in an established system, theft of labor is a far more consequential problem to address.

I'll bet if someone outside of our IP jurisdiction figured out a way to reliably and thoroughly reverse engineer the most complex commercial software from binaries so people could spit out a working, fully-customized copy of a commercial application from a prompt, and the entirety of the software development market would soon collapse, the tenor of this conversation would be very different.

Nothing ever existed in a vacuum. And you are right, the (potential) negative impact AI training has on what people do will only manifest in the future.

But no matter how I or anyone else feel about the car or how bad it is for the environment, or how much we dislike the noise they impose on us, it's simply not going to bring the horse back.

It might bring something else. Something better. Or something worse. But for the love of god stop talking about the horse. It's dead.

Another cop-out. No, the horse isn't dead. This technology is at its precipice and society outside of the tech world hasn't even started to react yet let alone develop entrenched immutable norms surrounding it. A good portion of what these algorithms put out isn't even particularly commercially useful... yet. There's a lot of time to change policy, to change corporate norms, to change compensation structures, and to change perspectives. Just because you find that prospect inconvenient compared to just throwing up your hands and saying fuck it, likely because you benefit from doing so, doesn't mean that you don't have a moral obligation to reduce the harm these behaviors will result in.

Beyond that, the technology is just the catalyst. It's a tool. The problem is what people are doing with it. That's an ongoing behavior that can be changed-- not a bell you can't un-ring.

I won't claim to know what's in your head, but most people I've encountered who rebuff complex topics with idealistic platitudes don't really think the topics are that simple. They're avoiding confronting the negative consequences of a behavior they have no intention of changing to avoid damaging their moral self-image.

Sigh, alright. Copping out of this one I guess.

I wonder how large the Venn overlap is for people who think IP is good and people who don't think hip hop is "real music"?

Two months? The (ai-luddite) preachers have been reciting this litany since the first decent diffusion models released over a year ago. They haven't slowed down any.

That's all great until people stop providing intellectual property for free because of the chilling effects.

Artists are already starting to completely paywall their content.

How far do we let AI scraping and incorporation go? Just say "fuck it" until there's nothing left to scrape other than content also made by AI?

"chilling effects" usually refers to when people decide not to share things because of potential legal consequences. For example, if people stop creating or distributing AI art because they don't want to be sued by artists for using their style, that's a chilling effect. Basically the opposite of what you are describing

>Just say 'fuck it' until there's nothing left to scrape other than content also made by AI?

Sounds good to me! There will always be people making free art, and AI will make this much easier.

The thing that I think people are missing is that AI-generated content CAN be used to improve AI models. There is no requirement that the input data is created without AI.

Furthermore, AI-generated content on the internet is not random; it is curated content. Generally speaking people don't post every image they generate with Stable Diffusion, they only post the best images. If you consider engagement metrics and user feedback (upvotes etc), they can be a valuable and useful part of a training set.

The fact that you think that sounds good and is not a bleak and dystopian hellscape tells me that your ideal future is likely my nightmare scenario.

I fear our views on this issue are wholly incompatible.

Imagine considering your random posts on reddit "work" and thinking people are stealing it when they train their models on your internet drivel.

All the misguided comments of my younger years coming to haunt me? Nightmare. Luckily I deleted my live journal many moons ago.

So it's valueless when the original author wants it to have value and valuable when OpenAI wants it to have value?

I am all for training AIs, but at least exhibit some self-consistency in your arguments!

A penny is close to valueless. A trillion pennies is a lot of value.

If we enforced intellectual property rights that harshly, nothing more complex than a 6502 would have ever been made.

I personally don't think IP has a place in modern society. But I was mostly replying to the authors comment.

My concerns mostly lie with the fact it's owned largely by $MSFT rather than a more "open source" contributing to society entity. But again that's a much different topic.

I'd say IP is more important in modern society than at any time in history.

It shouldn't have a place, but so long as people require the ownership of their own concepts to gain food and shelter, it has to.

This is an incorrect and unfair statement that would not pass the test in any court of law. ChatGPT uniquely orders information in a way that gives them a competitive advantage in the marketplace. While the source information is public, the ordering of it is proprietary and a trade secret.

Your argument is a reductio ad absurdum to "everything is made of atoms and no one ones atoms, ergo no one owns anything."

The source information in public? Copyright isn't a thing anymore?

That's news to me.

If you think ChatGPT has infringed on your copyright, you have legal recourse. Do you have evidence?

I'm sorry but you can't honestly use stolen without permission here. If you publish something and someone else acquires it legally (because you published it for free or because they paid for or otherwise obtained a license to it) then you don't get to control how the work is used after the fact. You only control the terms of them receiving a copy. You can't say "I didn't want my work used for AI training data when I published it so it's all stolen as far as I'm concerned". It just doesn't work that way.

Now that doesn't mean you can't license your work for exclusive use by humans and explicitly forbid AI training data in the license applied to your work, but you'd have to do that when you publish it, not retroactively.

Google drives traffic to your website, and generates revenue. It also respects IP and gives credit. Ai crawlers don't. Just because content is out in the open it doesn't mean there's no license to follow when using it. If they gave credit, respected IP and drove traffic then sure.

Whilst I'm not an AI proponent, Bing cites sources in the form of sites, thus driving traffic, so that's not strictly true. Bing seems to be somewhat of a sensation currently with consumers.

I am not against ai and i am open to any ai tools that give credit or satisfy the requirements of the license of whatever they ingested. Ai is good, theft is not. So if bing plays by the rules then thats great.

who's 'we,' white man? I've never been billed.

> white man?

Eh?

> I've never been billed.

Curious how much people's bills are inflated by ai crawlers constantly sucking their data and how much in revenue is lost since traffic is not brought to their websites. And since there's no way to stop this theft, since most of them don't honor robots.txt, people are forced to remove content. Perhaps those charged for bandwidth are losing some dime right now.

> Eh?

It's the punchline of a vaguely racist old joke involving Lone Ranger and Tonto. I have to admit that I also often think of when somebody uses "we" inappropriately to make their opinion or experience appear universal.

(But as seen here, you can't really just drop the punchline into a conversation.)

Sorry that’s my bad, I forget not everyone knows that reference.

The phrase "Who's 'we,' white man?" is a reference to a scene in the 1991 film "Grand Canyon." In the scene, a wealthy white man tries to help a stranded African American man in a dangerous part of town. The African American man responds to the white man's offer of help with the question "Who's 'we,' white man?" which is a critique of the white man's assumption that they are part of the same group. The phrase has since been used in various contexts to challenge assumptions of shared identity or experience.

Why is OpenAI getting involved? They are getting paid either way. The third parties should do the takedown if they are not happy about their endpoint being scraped.

Presumably, they're looking out for their paying users (see: they want to keep those paying users), who would have a terrible experience if and when they found out someone else had been using their APIs and/or API keys.

It's not clear to me that DMCA Takedown is an applicable legal process for that, but I guess when does that ever stop anyone these days.

What specific US laws do folks think that repo (or running/using the software in that repo) might have been violating? (I agree it seems likely that it's _some_ law, I'm not challenging that just asking if anyone has a legal analysis they want to share).

It's an excellent point. DMCA is for copyright. My take (I have a background in this area but IANAL): I think they can get away with the copyright because of the name/content usage (no one of the opposite end of the request is going to question that, it seems obvious), but I think it's clear to those in the know that's not WHY they went after this one.

In theory, they could probably use DCMA to go after anyone using the terms (right or wrong). In practicality, they used it as a tool to go after this particular one because they didn't like what they were doing.

DMCA covers circumvention devices, not just directly infringing material.

See for example, the group arrested for selling devices that allowed people to take control of their own Nintendo Switch systems[1].

Although, after digging into the story, it looks like they may have also operated an illicit app store containing cracked IPs, so that situation is a little murky.

[1] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/04/nintendo-hacker-ga...

I think jailbreaking is a current exception to the DMCA (according to the copyright office's latest report). An app store full of cracked games is obviously illegal, though.

CFAA[0] is one that comes to mind but I also think that has different issues with what might be overly vague terminology. It at least seems more applicable to this, though I am certainly not a legal expert.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

There was a somewhat recent supreme court ruling that said just breaking some ToS is not a CFAA violation. Unless the gpt4free repo had straight up stolen credentials the CFAA shouldn't apply.

Does "takedown notice" automatically equal "DMCA"? The repo itself and the parent to your comment don't mention DMCA at all.

Hm, good point, I think of "takedown notice" as being about the DMCA, because I never heard that term at all before the DMCA, I think of it as a term of art from DMCA. But people could be using it differently or mis-using it.

However, this is on Github. Github specifically has a "DMCA Takedown Policy" [1]. I don't believe they have any other policy or procedure involving a "takedown notice". But sure, I could be wrong, or the notice on the repo could be not quite right about what's going on.

Other companies, even big ones, will just take down anything a big corporation asks them to, with no written policy or a written policy basically saying that's what they'll do, while using language implying the DMCA (like "takedown notice"), when that's not what they're doing at all. But Github has actually been pretty good at actually doing this according to the procedure spelled out in DMCA, and not just randomly for whatever another big corporation might want. And being clear about what they're doing why if they're doing something else.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/content-removal-polic...

From the submission (the repo's readme):

> We got a takedown request by openai's legal team...

Did Github take a separate action somewhere?

Good point! This was all confusing.

> Xtekky initially told me that he hadn't decided whether to take the repo down or not. However, several hours after this story first published, we chatted again and he told me that he plans to keep the repo up and to tell OpenAI that, if they want it taken down, they should file a formal request with GitHub instead of with him.

> "I believe they contacted me before to pressurize me into deleting the repo myself," he said. "But the right way should be an actual official DMCA, through GitHub."

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/openai-sends-shutdown-lett...

Fraud?

They should be happy that OpenAI went after them with the DMCA and not for computer hacking and fraud, which is what they technically did by hijacking other people's API keys.

A lawyer must have advised this, as financial fraud likely has a higher burden of proof. They might still proceed with criminal charges (if a DA agrees) or a lawsuit.

Yeah what's curious to me is why OpenAI has grounds here vs [the abused 3rd parties]. Maybe they are trying to stand up for the people using their API as a courtesy because they want them to stay in business or something, but it seems the damaged parties are the 3rd party services bankrolling the access, and so they'd need to pursue legal action and/or patch their services.

I do imagine OpenAI has something in their terms where you're not allowed to use their APIs unless you agree to their terms, which includes payment and not using other accounts than your own (fraud). So maybe that's it?

The author does not use official APIs so the author does not have to agree to the official ToS.