If the verbatim examples that have been going around are true, that’s bad. I’d love to know more details around it — prompts used, whether that’s an old model, etc. This seems like plagiarism more than anything.
Yielding verbatim snippets of copyrighted content is a problem for OpenAI though.
It’s not clear to me where the line is.
Sometimes they're so overfit that the compression isn't even lossy, and the data is encoded verbatim in the NN.
But I disagree with the underlying assumption that you can anthropomorphize LLMs. Gradient descent and backpropagation don't take place in the brain. LLMs "learn" in the same way that Excel sheets "learn".
Humans are living beings with needs and rights. A person being able to legally squat in a home doesn't mean that a drone occupying property for some amount of time also has squatter's rights, even though you could easily and affordably automate and scale the deployment of drones to live and hide away on properties long enough to attain rights regarding properties all over the country.
but, more importantly, OpenAI can also be sued for tortious interference? (basically the civil equivalent of accessory)
That's function of the legal system, not of the technology. If tomorrow someone made a perfect dolphin-Esperanto translator and proved Dolphins were as smart as humans, you still can't sue a dolphin until the legal system says so.
I await the HN ban with fear..
[1] I'm not even doing referencing - so I am surely an LLM.
Not exactly, no, but the 'neurons that fire together wire together' way of learning has a pretty similar effect.
> LLMs "learn" in the same way that Excel sheets "learn".
I've never seen an excel sheet do anything like backpropagation.
Not strictly in the sense you mentioned (assuming that you mean "by themselves") but people may find [1] and [2] interesting.
[1] https://pub.towardsai.net/building-a-neural-network-with-bac...
[2] https://towardsdatascience.com/demystifying-feed-forward-and...
Backprop doesn't happen in us, but I think our neurones still do gradient descent – synapses that fire together, wire together.
And ultimately, at the deepest level we can analyse, our brains' atoms are doing quantum field diffusion equations, which you can also do in an Excel spreadsheet, so that kind of reductionism doesn't help either.
> Humans are living beings with needs and rights. A person being able to legally squat in a home doesn't mean that a drone occupying property for some amount of time also has squatter's rights, even though you could easily and affordably automate and scale the deployment of drones to live and hide away on properties long enough to attain rights regarding properties all over the country.
Yes, but we can also do tissue cultures and crude bioprinting, so it's a very foreseeable future where exactly the same argument will also be true for living organisms rather than digital minds.
We need to figure out what the deeper rules are that lead to the status quo, not merely mimic the superficial result. The latter is how cargo cults function.
Sure, that's an interesting path of inquiry, and one should be free to understand themselves as being no different than a machine if they desire.
But the objective of laws is the benefit of (at least some) humans, not machines covered in lab grown tissue. The process of being human is a big part of what makes us human.
I think you're misapprehending — I mean an entity fully 3D printed out of tissue, no machinery (unless you're counting all biology as machinery, but I think you're not doing that).
I recon bio-printing is now where home computing was in the Apple 1 era, so this is a way off, but it's foreseeable.
> The process of being human is a big part of what makes us human.
Mmm. How much has that process that changed since the ancient world?
How do you recon that, Apple 1 was Turing complete. We haven't printed life, that would be a tremendous accomplishment.
I think we're closer to Edison inventing a lightbulb as a step to computers being possible. Printing a conscious thing, at all, would be like the transistor. An Apple 1 analogue wouldn't be likely because of the terrible ethics of a "shitty" printed human.
Sure we have, and in multiple different senses.
The ones which matters here are cell culture, which is nowhere near the fanciest bar that's been surpassed in this field, and tissue culture which is somewhat harder but the reason why I recon it's at the Apple 1 level is that a small number of experimentalists are messing around with it using expensive equipment that you can technically buy at home but you need to be well trained to actually use, for example:
https://youtu.be/Z_ZGq8Tah0k?si=u6bBatjuSWcyNYJ3
And, more broadly, there's bioprinting as a research etc. field:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_bioprinting
And here's a TED talk from ten years ago where they demoed an early research 3D printed kidney on stage:
No. That isn't printing life, that is taking already living cells, priming and transforming them into something useful. Regardless, I'd count it if we could make an entire living organism this way, but we cant. Creating a working organ is no doubt amazing, and proof that this technology is worth pursuing, but it isn't "printing life" any more than producing life saving drugs is.
In your example you are talking about being able to bioprint a person(they have to be a person to have that right) to squat a property. Bio printing an organ isn't an example of that, it's not even close. Saying that we are anywhere near being able to print a human to squat a property is pretty ridiculous.
Which is absolutely sufficient for the usage I described upthread. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's mandatory for the point I was making, as — fun though bio-printed werewolves, dragons, and fae would be — my point only works if you get humans out of the process rather than some other species. A bioprinted horse is probably slightly harder than a bioprinted human, but the latter isn't getting any squatting rights.
I could've linked to work on synthetic genomes and nucleotides to give evidence for lower-level creation of live, but they don't matter for the same reason:
My point is that there's a pathway heading off into the distance, and somewhere in the distance but before the horizon can be found bio-printed humans with all the same moral issues we're now just beginning to taking seriously thanks to AI being conversational, and if we had something completely customised, that's cool and all, but it doesn't make anyone go "oh, they're people" the way a humanoid body with human DNA getting off a table saying "hello, nice to meet you" does.
> In your example you are talking about being able to bioprint a person(they have to be a person to have that right) to squat a property. Bio printing an organ isn't an example of that, it's not even close. Saying that we are anywhere near being able to print a human to squat a property is pretty ridiculous.
I wrote "an entity fully 3D printed out of tissue […] is a way off, but it's foreseeable" and compared bio-printing today to a nearly 50 year old computer, and one of my references was a link to a youtube channel where someone is attempting to do a small-scale prototype thing along these lines with a handful of organs made from mouse cells grown in his own lab (and mouse cells rather than human because of the disease risk not because something magic happens with human cells). You're mixing up what I think is foreseeable with what I say already exists, and using the nonexistence of what I think can be foreseen to argue against what does exist.
No! Hebbian learning is categorically NOT gradient based learning. Hebbian update rules are local and not the gradient of any function.
Cortical learning is so vastly different from how artificial neural networks “learn” they cannot even begin to be meaningfully compared mathematically. Hebbian learning is not optimization and backprop is not local learning.
Part of the problem of these discussions is a bunch of clueless people talking with authority.
I have to keep reminding myself that outside of my own speciality, ChatGPT knows more than me despite its weaknesses, so I bet ChatGPT knows more about Hebbian learning than I do.
I'll look into that more.
most of the world disagrees with this view, and that means they will create the AI that wins.
You misunderstood me. I was talking about something more fundamental.
Understanding is data compression. They are the same thing. Learning patterns, building mental models, creating abstractions, generalizing, gaining intuition/a feel for something - all the things humans engage in as part of learning and understanding the world - are all acts of lossy data compression.
Anyone got more details on this?
Superficially it sounds like total BS; a highly compressed zip file does not exhibit any characteristics of learning.
Algorithmically derived highly compressed video streams do not exhibit characteristics of learning.
?
I’ve vaguely heard the learning can be considered to exhibit the characteristics of compression in that understanding of content (eg. segmentation of video content resulting in more highly compressed videos) can lead to better compression schemes.
…but saying you can “do a with b” and “a and b are fundamentally the same thing” seems like a leap…?
It seems self evident you can have compression without comprehension.
An LLM has limited parameters. If an LLM had infinite parameters it could just memorize the results of every single addition question in existence and could not claim to have understood anything. Because it has finite parameters, if an LLM wants to get a lower loss on all addition questions, it needs to come up with a general algorithm to perform addition. Indeed, Neel Nanda trained a transformer to do addition mod 113 on relatively few examples, and it eventually learned some cursed Fourier transform mumbo jumbo to get 0 loss https://twitter.com/robertskmiles/status/1663534255249453056.
And the fact it has developed this "understanding" as an ability to learn a general pattern in the training data enables it to compress. I claim that the number of bits required to encode the general algorithm is fewer than the number of bits required to memorize every single example. If it weren't then the transformer would simply memorize every single example. But if it doesn't have space then it is forced to try to compress by developing a general model.
And the ability to compress enables you to construct a language model. Essentially, the more things compress, the higher the likelihood you assign them. Given a sequence of tokens say "the cat sat on the", we should expect "the cat sat on the mat" to compress into fewer bits than "the cat sat on the door". This is because the latter is far more common and intuitively more common sequences should compress more. You can then look at the number of bits used for every single choice of token following "the cat sat on the" and thus develop a probability distribution for the next token. The exact details of this I'm unclear on. https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/why-gzip-just-beat-a-large-l... this gives a good summary.
I fundamentally disagree. That's not some established fact, just a narrative used by those who wish to plagiarize using "AI".
Our collective human limitations(physical, mental and temporal) are sort of invisible implicit rules that we all follow in one way or the other. If an entity is not bound by those rules then I don't see why that entity should be treated the same as a human.
Companies already make this differentiation.
For example take captcha and bot detection. Some of the heuristics are based on inherent human limitations like response time, click time, mouse acceleration etc.
I doubt youtube or any other streaming service will be happy if you want to stream all their videos to train a hypothetical human like AI(which views and prepares notes like a human) at a hugely accelerated speed compared to a regular human. You can guess how quickly they will cite fair usage policies.
What I want to say is there are fundamental differences between a human and an AI. So, we should not be quick to dismiss any concerns just because AI can "mimic" humans in certain areas.
Humans have rights, software tools don’t.
If you grant an LLM the full set of human rights, then it can consume information, regurgitate copyrighted works, and use it to generate money for itself. However, considering blatantly obvious theft as “homage” goes hand in hand with free will, agency, being in control of yourself, not being enslaved and abused, etc. Pondering various scenarios along those lines really gets to the heart of why an LLM is so very much not a human, and how subjecting it to the same treatment as humans is a ridiculous notion.
If you don’t grant LLM human rights, then ClosedAI’s stance is basically that pirating works is OK because they pass them through a black box of if conditions and it leads to results that they can monetize. That’s such a solid argument, it’ll surely play well in the court of law.
Training data is not an “LLM does it”; first because “it” here is not “learning” or understanding in human sense (otherwise you would have to presume that an LLM is a human), and second because a software tool doesn’t have agency and it’s really just Microsoft using a tool based on copyrighted works to generate profit.
What I expect to happen is whoever has the most influence and power will get what they want and we'll end up raising a generation with the implicit understanding of "that's just how things are," natural order, truth, reality, and all that jazz.
The only thing that ever changes outcomes is if the contradiction status quo is incapable of being managed.
Here's an article from November 2023 that discusses this:
https://not-just-memorization.github.io/extracting-training-...
Edit: it looks like you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit lately. Can you please review them and stick to the intended use of the site? We'd appreciate it.
Can't you, though? I'd thought in general, it's a very important for the market to be able to do just that, otherwise everything gets gummed up in webs of exclusive contractual dependencies between established companies.
Typically providers of online databases go to some effort to stop people from sharing logins. Even from that point or view, I can imagine scraping articles and providing paraphrases of it for a fee is fishy.
All I'm saying, to some people it's obvious that the whole LLM on scraped Internet is fair use, to me it is not obvious.
Seems like the "problem" is that NYT etc gives privileged access to search engines for indexing their content, but then get upset when snippets of the indexed content is being shown to users without the users having to fight the paywall or whatever.
This article also claims that the screenshot is coming from ChatGPT when it clearly is not.
I'm not sure the problem goes away simply if the LLM in question (or any other one) gets some "no verbose regurgitation" filter.
>Is that fair use? IANAL, but doesn't sound like it.
If you pay someone to do the summarisation for you, then you publish the content and charge a fee for it, you're the one liable, not the person you paid to summarise it for you. Similarly if you ask GPT to do it for you, then publish it, you're liable for what you publish; GPT is just a summarisation tool.
So, if the summaries are derived works and not covered by fair use, then both you and the summarizee are separately breaking the NYT's copyrights. Otherwise, if this is covered by fair use, then you are both in the clear.
Finally, GPT is not "a summarization tool" in this case. If you provide a copy of a NYT article as a prompt and then ask for summarization, then yes, it is clear that GPT is not doing anything wrong, even if it spits out the exact same text. But if you simply ask for a summary of a specific article by, say, just name and date, and you get a copy of it, it's clear that GPT is storing the original data in some way, and thus it has copied the NYT's protected works without permission.
In this particular case they were using it via Bing, which actively did a HTTP request to the particular article to extract the content. So GPT hadn't memorised it verbatim, instead it fetched it, much like a human using a search engine would.
Additionally, even the use through Copilot is very debatable. They are not returning the NYT link, which requires a subscription, they are returning the contents of it even to non-subscribers. And they are doing this in a commercial product, not a non profit like the Internet Archive, which has some arguments for fair use.
At some level it becomes a subversion of NYTs fees. First, say I subscribe and simply host the articles verbatim, for a fee. Clearly, that's not right.
Suppose I change some spelling or word order, or use a synonym or two. That's still not ok.
And if I substantially paraphrase the articles? I guess this is the relevant case. This is kind of what LLMs do. And also feels like not fair use.
That's not what OpenAI is doing; it's not selling summarised articles as a service. Your example is a false equivalence.
>This is kind of what LLMs do. And also feels like not fair use
An LLM doesn't do this unless you ask it to. And if you then take that output and publish it as your own, you're breaching the copyright, not OpenAI.
In this case, OpenAI is violating copyright by modifying, reproducing and distributing copyrighted content to its customer.
I read a NYT article, then summarize it into a link title for reddit. Reddit then republishes the summary to all of its users.
So the demand to destroy those databases seems very dubious to me.
Of course later violating fair use is another issue.
As always, the answer is.. "it depends". I guess it depends mostly on the jurisdiction that applies to you. "Fair use" can have rather different legal meaning (or not exist at all) in different countries.
This is demonstrably wrong. Many countries have both freedoms, albeit some have less strong protection than others.
They said "Most other countries" and you replied with "Many countries"
"Many" does not necessary include "most" but "most" does include "many".
No, it doesn't. If a set is of sufficiently low cardinality, “most” (in extreme cases, even “all”) of the set may not be “many”.
Most-all, in fact—Catholic Presidents of the United States have been Democrats. But it is not the case that many Catholic Presidents have been Democrats.
Most women to have served on the US Supreme Court did so only after its first 200 years. But, again, there were not many women who served on the Supreme Court only after its first 200 years.
I replace the following sentence from my previous comment:
> Most other countries don't have freedom of expression and freedom of the press, so copyright law in a different country usually lacks a unifying exception test like fair use to supplement the specific enumerated exceptions.
with the following:
Copyright law in most countries usually lacks a unifying exception test like fair use to supplement the specific enumerated exceptions in each respective country.
The rest of my previous comment remains the same.
I think you’re confusing terms of service and copyright. IANAL but what you describe sounds exactly like fair use to me, irrespective of how much you are paying NYT.
I think people severely underestimate how much they've grown accustomed to this information being freely available. It's easy to say "Well it shouldn't be available with ChatGPT," but if we actually put everything back behind a paywall and stopped people from doing things like writing blogs or newsletters that summarize the news, people here would get angry very fast.
Google has been accused for years of replacing sources with their "One Box"--the big answers at the top of the page, which are usually pulled from or corroborated by search results. They don't want you to leave the search results page (where the ads are).
Instead, I think they're paying for this:
Not only that, look at a few news articles from Tier 2 and down publications, and you'll realize that almost all of them are directly sourced from NYT and others. They'll say "so and so happened, according to The Times" (and usually link the article there)
Just like during the pandemic how everyone became an epidemiologist, suddenly everyone's a copyright lawyer. I'll just dispute your assertion by saying:
1. Questions of fair use are famously gray, and anyone who declares something as "entirely fair use", with no caveats, is nearly always wrong except for the must obvious cases, which the given example is most definitely not. A judge has wide latitude in determining fair use.
2. People should familiarize themselves with the four factors of fair use determination. In particular, if a work is purely derivative of a source work and substantially negatively impacts the market for the original work, it's very likely to not be considered fair use.
A great overview is https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
Roll back 20+ years ago on Slashdot and you'll see the exact same thing.
Copyright has been a hot button issue on the internet for decades. People end up thinking (rightly or wrongly) that they understand it without being a lawyer.
It's very possible that the example provided above is an example of fair use in some country, and that the website offering that service could be hosted there.
Quite literally, not even the lawyers or courts understand it. This is very much a "learn as you go" exercise for humanity in general at this point in time.
I only see this phenomenon speeding up. Strange times.
This is just a felony contempt of business model issue. Computers invalidated their business models and they're doing everything they possibly can to hang on for dear life. Society needs to move on already.
Books are just strings of letters, yet copyright has still been useful to increase the volume and utility of books.
All that said, I do find the life+70y an absurdly long time.
What do you propose is the business model for artists in the absence of copyright?
We must strengthen these business models that don't depend on artificial scarcity because this number selling nonsense was over the second computers were invented. It's as dumb as asserting that you need permission to use memcpy or the mov CPU instruction.
In the US, the original copyright length was 14 years, and then 28, and eventually the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. I think the intent of the law is economically justified, but the current length is outrageous.
This is how art worked for millenia; someone commissions a chapel roof painting, someone commissions a concerto, someone commissions a statue, someone buys a chair, etc.
Artists still do this today, and there is no issue determining value beforehand. Artists list their commission prices, or their hourly costs, etc. This is a perfectly normal thing that happens everyday.
It seems to have been invented by laywers, for lawyers. Nobody else really benefits as much as they do. The whole entirety of society vs. a single profession of dubious morality.
meanwhile, most tech is moving towards subscriptions?
Art is getting paid "non-greedily". People buy a song or art piece, and then people 10 years later buy a song or art piece. That's not one person paying twice for the same song, it's two people buying the same thing.
If people still value that art for that price later, I don't see how this is a "greedy" thing. is art magically supposed to turn open source CC0 after 5 years? Tech sure doesnt work like that.
But ok so I'm a young musician. Nobody's heard of me and nobody wants to commission a concert or album. What do I do? Quit?
@Vicinity9635 It's not just lawyer greed, it creates economic fairness by preventing others from profiting from your creative work.
In the current system, artists might work for many years on a single work, or work many years perfecting their craft before anyone wants to pay for their work. Copyright gives them a way to earn money in the future that compensates them for the work they did in the past. It incentivizes creativity. Don't get me wrong, I don't think copyright is perfect, but you really ought to think more about the system you're proposing, because it's not making much sense.
(full disclosure, I’m a techie who’s gradually woken up to the idea that the tech might just be the most abused way to exploit people)
It's a bit ironic, because a lot of tech offers partial compensation in stock. Something else that really doesn't happen in games unless you work for like, the 3-4 largest studios. So they should at least understand that your compensation is not all based on labor for time worked.
that's gone out the door in the digital age. Compaies at this point have spent centuries trying to enfoce this model while witholding stuff like stock and royalties to take a part of what the company enjoys by protifting for decades off of a single (underpaid) piece of labor.
I don't exactly sympathize with a robot now trying to do the same. Pay your labor.
I don't know. Anyone funding the work is accepting a risk.
> Should they not have been paid after 1991?
They definitely should get paid for their shows and live performances. The band itself can't be copied. Artists are extremely scarce.
Their art, however, is not. Once created, the scarcity of their recordings is artificial and fundamentally time limited anyway. Even if I were extremely tolerant of copyright, I'd argue for a term of only 5-10 years maximum with absolutely no possibility of extension.
In other words, even if we accept copyright as legitimate, they sure as hell shouldn't still be getting paid for some late 80s album. They've already been adequately compensated for those creations. If they want more, they should have to keep making new stuff so that they can benefit from new copyrights which will also expire after a short time.
Creators are not supposed to be able to strike gold once and then enjoy eternal royalties. Copyright must have short time frames or it's in breach of the social contract. The reality is we're doing creators a favor by pretending that it's hard to copy their stuff so they can make some money. We do this because they assured us that eventually all of it would belong to us: works would the public domain.
The copyright industry isn't keeping up their end of the bargain. They continuously pull the rug out from under us by extending copyright to the point we'll be long dead before our culture is returned to us. It's offensive and we should all stop pretending. They need reminding that public domain is the natural and default state of all intellectual work.
> How would you predict that value before its creation (or even after)?
I'd look at the artist's past work. If there is no past work, then I don't know.
> If you're saying that only the labor has value
I'm not saying that at all. Creations are valuable. Creators are valuable. The labor of creation is valuable.
Value is assigned to stuff by humans. Obviously humans value art. The price however is given by supply and demand. The fact is that supply of intellectual works approach infinity after they are created and therefore their prices approach zero. So it makes perfect sense to assign prices to the labor of creation but zero sense to assign a price to the product of creation. Copyright is an exercise in denying reality.
> and all labor is valued equally
I definitely did not say that. All labor is different. I value some creators a lot more than others. Some creators I don't value at all.
> that sounds sort of like marxism
I must apologize if I gave that impression. I hate marxism.
Why not? The fact is that even if the album is free, there will be people paying spotify $10/month to listen to it on demand. How is it fair that Spotify can profit from it for decades to come because they offer convenience, over the artist who made the music 10 years earlier and now relinquishes their art not even a quarter into a typical career?
Copyright is abusrd now, but it's not a bad concept. I think the original copyright law of 14 + 14 worked well enough. Life expectancy increased so I'd increase it to 14 + 14 + 14 (or 10 years after the death of the original author, whatever comes first). You fund an artist for their typical career length (if they choose to extend twice) and once they are (near) retired the song is free to work off of. In the meantime you simply negotiate if you want to use their work.
Copyright means that you need to at least pay that artist you stole from in some way, which the government enforces so artists don't stop creating.
CliffNotes, Wikipedia, etc. have huge quantities of summarized copyrighted work.
Second, you ignored the "purely derivative" bit. You have to look at to what extent the use is derivative or transformative. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use for a bit about that. (Note, this is a legal term defined by various precedents. OpenAI can't just argue, "Turning it into an LLM is a transform, so it is transformative!") Since CliffNotes is educational and Wikipedia is nonprofit, it is relatively easy for both to qualify as transformative.
As a result your response underscores the point that was made. There are a lot of shades of grey. You really can't just seize on a couple of phrases and key points, then jump straight to the answer. You have to understand how the courts will decide, and then accept that there is an actual judgment call whose outcome depends on the judge judging.
(I'm not a lawyer, but I have had excessive exposure to them in the past.)
Is there data that supports this? I’d be interested to know what % of people who buy a Cliffs Notes have already _bought_ the original.
But, anecdotally, it's what I've seen to be the case.
Yes.
For example, Wikipedia cites many research journals that otherwise are available only by subscription.
Prior to Wikipedia, gated information centers were the norm.
The question was NOT whether it spreads information from the articles to people who wouldn't have paid for it. The question was whether it suppresses sales of the articles to people who otherwise might have paid for it.
That's a more complicated question of fact. Some people now read Wikipedia and won't buy the article. Some people encounter the reference on Wikipedia and decide to buy the article. Which happens more?
I don't have data. But publishers do. And https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2022/11/01/guest-post-wi... shows what publishers concluded.
Publishers concluded that Wikipedia references are good for sales. And so jumped on the chance to cooperate with https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/. Which is therefore able to give free access to 90% of subscription only databases to you if you can prove that you're the kind of person who is likely to add citations to Wikipedia.
Legal questions are funny like that. You have to answer the question actually asked. If you merely answer another one that sounds similar to you, your answer is generally wrong.
You're the one presenting unfounded claims with confidence here. There is well established case law about not being able to copyright facts. If you are actually fully paraphrasing a presentation of facts / ideas and not just altering a couple of words here and there, then there is a very strong case for non-infringement.
No, I'm not. On the contrary, I'm really looking forward to this case because I believe it will be a great test of a bunch of concepts that are totally novel in the world of copyright law as it applies to generative AI. The only things I am presenting with confidence are:
1. That anyone who declares that something is unambiguously fair use (or, contrarily, unambiguously infringing) is likely wrong. There is simply too much latitude by judges, and there have certainly been cases where a ruling went one way, only to be overturned on appeal.
2. While I certainly have an opinion on how I think this case will be decided, I'm not presenting that with unwarranted confidence. Instead, I linked that great article on the 4 factors of fair use determination because it's clear to me lots of people are saying "fair use!" on one side or the other with no understanding of the factors judges must actually consider when making a determination.
However, none of that matters in this particular thread. There are well established precedents about paraphrasing news articles and they do not support the claim you made
Remember. The NY Times does not have a record of filing frivolous lawsuits. Particularly not against companies with deep pockets. So it is almost certainly true that a lawyer who knows the law better than you thinks that this has a real chance. So you should be looking for flaws in trivial defenses that you can think up, rather than assuming that you know best.
For example take your copyright facts defense. That would be great if the NY Times was a phone book. They aren't, in addition to facts they offer analysis, editorial positions, and so on. For example I just asked ChatGPT, "In 2016, did the New York Times generally support or oppose President Trump?" I got back an answer talking about various kinds of concerns that the New York Times had, including an editorial titled, "Why Donald Trump Should Not Be President". The copy that ChatGPT needed to have to do that has a lot more than just facts in it.
Now if you paraphrased the NY Times like ChatGPT did when it answered me, you'd have a perfect fair use defense. But you aren't doing it for money, you didn't make a copy of all the NY Times, you aren't destroying the market for the NY Times, and you're legally able to own copyright in your transformed work. OpenAI is doing it for money, did copy all of the NY Times, is seriously impacting the market for NY Times articles, and ChatGPT generated text does not get a copyright.
Fair use is filled with shades of grey. Even if ChatGPT appears to do the same thing that you do, it is far less clear that OpenAI will enjoy the same level of fair use defense.
> They aren't, in addition to facts they offer analysis, editorial positions, and so on.
Those opinions and ideas are also not copyrightable. Only expressions of them are copyrightable, which is why paraphrasing facts, ideas and opinions is not a violation of copyright.
> Fair use is filled with shades of grey.
Yes, but not all those shade are equal. There is a long history of litigation showing that paraphrasing news articles is fine.
This is the weakest part of the case(s) against OpenAI. "Derivative work" is a legal term of art meaning a direct adaptation, like writing a screenplay of a book or translating a book into another language.
NYT has a stronger case than Sarah Silverman here because they can show actual 'memorized' text rather than just summarization, but given that those memorizations are a) an unintended failure mode of the training process, and b) from an older version of the model that has been updated to no longer regurgitate memorized text, it's not really clear how in current form GPT could possibly be considered a derivative work.
The latter is more defensible.
On the other hand, it's understandable why NYT is worried. OpenAI itself says that occupations like: Writers and Authors, Web and Digital Interface Designers, News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists, Proofreaders and Copy Markers are "90-100% exposed" to what OpenAI is building.
I don't care that the car replaced the horse carriage because it didn't need to compensate horses nor handlers to do so. AI being the newest iteration of scraping data from artists, writers, etc. to profit millions off of is directly using the "horse handler's" work. If these LLM's threw NYT a royalty to use their articles as training material, there wouldn't be a lawsuit.
I have worked on many documentaries and any time we said “fair use” internally what we were implicitly saying is “nobody will come after us because they know that we are probably safe under fair use if this escalated.“ But again, we could never preemptively apply it. We were just anticipating potential conflict and gauging how likely it was to occur.
If that were true, I could take a band that I hate, copy all of their music note-for-note, then release an exact copy on the market and undercut them by selling their entire discography for $0.01
Fair Use requires one of several enumerated activities, including satire, education, journalism. You can’t just copy content and hope that it passes Fair Use.
Hire a lawyer if you are unsure. But at least read the Wikipedia article on the subject if you are going to talk about it.
In the US, whether or not you make money has little to do with whether or not your use qualifies as "fair use".
That a use is noncommercial is often a deciding factor in the success of a fair use defense. GP is overstating it though, since it’s still one of many factors.
But what I was arguing was that a use is not "fair use" merely because it's noncommercial in nature. I cannot make copies of movies and give them away on the street for free and successfully claim "fair use".
> In sum, if an original work and secondary use share the same or highly similar purposes, and the secondary use is commercial, the first fair use factor is likely to weigh against fair use, absent some other justification for copying.
Weird Al has made a fantastic living copying music while only changing lyrics. He makes very heavy use of the satire plank of Fair Use.
The “commercial” test is only part of the decision criteria for Fair Use.
"Does Al get permission to do his parodies?
Al does get permission from the original writers of the songs that he parodies. While the law supports his ability to parody without permission, he feels it’s important to maintain the relationships that he’s built with artists and writers over the years. Plus, Al wants to make sure that he gets his songwriter credit (as writer of new lyrics) as well as his rightful share of the royalties."
The fact that he could rely on fair use is separate from whether he as an artist does rely on fair use.
The "commercial" test is only a part if the criteria and not necessary, but to say it has little impact is clearly false.
Not only does he get permission from the original authors, he also pays royalties to the authors despite legally not having to do so.
Based upon what? You think other publishers use NYTimes articles for free without license?
Presumably, if it can remember at least a paragraph or two of each article, then surely the same would be true of any text it ingested and the model size would approach the dataset size (probably actually much larger). I don't believe this is the case at all, even searching around, I've not found any good recent examples of it regurgitating copyrighted text verbatim.
It's cool to hate AI stuff if you're a creative atm. But gotta love those generative/algorithm based PS brushes, that's still real art!
"Indeed, the opening paragraph of "A Game of Thrones" by George R.R. Martin, with the chapter titled "Bran," starts as follows:
"The morning had dawned clear and cold, with a crispness that hinted"
And then it cuts off, whether that's because OAI now have an oh shit filter or just the model had access to the first page or publicly available articles quoting the first line, I'm not sure.
I tried other chapters and random sections and it could get a sentence or two right but then hallucinated; what's more likely NYT and GRRM? That your works are being reproduced verbatim? Or that Facebook, YouTube descriptions, fan tumblrs and hell, the publicly available and multiple GoT related wikis that include a variety of passages from the books were used as training data?
"It could be fair use if conditions a, b, and c are met. Condition a means..." ;)
I think what wouldn't be covered is reproducing substantial portions of an article, especially if it's done without attribution. Tier 2 publications that fully reprint NYT or AP/Reuters articles are usually doing this via a paid News Service or Content License. See: https://nytlicensing.com/content/new-york-times-news-service...
I hope the NYT prevails here, personally. Models will (and are) currently tainted by data they should not contain and for longer term privacy concerns this needs to be addressed early and have significant consequences or we're headed towards a world where this type of technology will make our ad-targeted world seem like a much more manageable past.
You just described Google. When you think about it, it's surprising that Google is legal. However, it is well established that what Google does is perfectly legal. Remember that internally Google keeps and uses complete verbatim copies of every web page they index.
Yes, Google offers a link to the source. If OpenAI did the same, even if only 0.1% of people clicked on the links and NYTimes hardly got any revenue from it, would that make it legal in your eyes? What if they implemented a system that detected when it was outputting a verbatim copy of something and simply paraphrased it? NYTimes clearly doesn't have copyright on paraphrased versions of their articles. I think it would be pretty silly if the government forced them to do that as it wouldn't make any practical difference to anyone.
Paraphrasing is also known as cloning and is often a copyright violation
In US copyright law facts cannot be copyrighted, so copyright on factual content like newspaper articles is limited. Simply replacing a few words wouldn't work, but I am certain that GPT-4 is capable of paraphrasing factual content at a level that would not be considered infringement if a human did it.
Genuinely - what are you talking about besides your own assumptions? you just assume everything google does is legal and therefore any one else doing anything arguably similar must also be legal? Without regard for factual details that do matter to copyright law? Such as license?? Your own description of copyright law here is very stunted - you can't paraphrase articles of the NYTimes and call it a fair use. You can report on what the NYtimes reports on... because that's what news is.
Not an assumption. This is well established. They've been doing it for twenty years!
> Without regard for factual details that do matter to copyright law? Such as license??
What license? Google doesn't in general have or need an explicit license to crawl websites and neither does OpenAI.
It's not at all well-established. How many anti-trust suits is Google facing now? Your proposition defies common sense.
>What license? Google doesn't in general have or need an explicit license to crawl websites and neither does OpenAI.
It's not the crawling the website that OpenAI did that it needs a license for... why bother conversing if you are going to be this obtuse?
Seems like the legal answer is unclear but, like Napster, such a system seems like it would lose in court.
One site clones fox news. One clones news max. And so on, cloning many news sites, sports sites, any news site. Automated, massive scale content farming. Think of the websites recommended by Taboola but, realistically, a whole lot worse.
Nobody is seriously going to ChatGPT and trying to trick it into regurgitating old NYT articles as an alternative to paying for access to NYT's archives. Meanwhile, newspapers went as far as getting the laws changed in several countries because they felt Google was competing with them too much and didn't like the fact that it was legal.
Can they? Here's reference to a legal fight where Google scraped song lyrics from a lyrics website, and presented the lyrics verbatim directly to users (bypassing the original site and the ads that allowed that site to operate)
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-law...
Google has a wide range of products and shakedowns. Not all of them are "perfectly" legal: Google is being challenged in court over some of their shakedowns and products practices.
The whole point of a search engine (as we've classically known them) is to index the web and respond to queries with a list of links that you will inspect and click through on. The whole point of an LLM chatbot tool is to eliminate those inspecting and clicking-through steps, becoming a one-stop shop for content whose substance was created by someone else. That's also the whole point of GP's hypothetical, which is why it works as an analogy.
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There are substantially better arguments for search engines being legitimate fair use. Consider, for example, transformation. AI defenders will argue that these systems are transformative because they reshuffle elements of their input in their output, but that's clearly a much weaker form of transformation than one in which the transformed work has an entirely different nature and purpose, i.e. search engines vs. the results they return. Ultimately these technicality-based "nuh uh" arguments aren't going to save the practice of training AI on unlicensed data, because they are incompatible with the spirit of copyright law even if the novel nature of these technologies means the letter of said law can't quite nail them down yet.
If these arguments do succeed, it will be because the judicial/regulatory environment in which they were applied has been corrupted by capital.
An LLM takes an input string a corpus of text, and returns a series of text that best comes after the next input string.
To get a paragraph of output, you run the search over and over again
Both the search and LLM reshuffle the inputs to the outputs.
If I'm describing the purpose of the LLM, it's got a wide number of usages. "Making my resume look more professional" or "be a crud api" or "reformat my ask into a api call to X service" or "give me a timeline of events surrounding Y with source links"
If I'm describing the purpose of an 18 wheeler, it's got a wide number of usages. "Carry my chicken" or "carry my lettuce" or "carry my Cheetos". Or, simply, "carry my groceries".
And how did the training data contribute to the content in any meaningful way? Inspiration isn't substance.
You think all fantasy writers gotta pay Tolkien estate bc so much of fantasy draws from his tropes? Lmao no.
If training data is so unimportant, why not simply not use it and avoid the controversy? At the very least that would certainly fix the issue where the model demonstrates how "inspired" it is by NYT articles by reproducing them verbatim.
:)
Possession is not a crime when it comes to copyright. It's not like physical things (e.g. drugs or guns) at all. This is why comparing copyright violations to theft is silly.
ChatGPT can absolutely keep verbatim copies of the entire works of basically anything and not run afoul of the law. When it regurgitates a small part of an article that's covered by fair use in theory but the truth is that fair use can only be determined by a judge in a court of law when someone is sued. It cannot be determined with any sort of certainty ahead of time. It's a legal defense, nothing more.
Summarizing content has been legal forever as well (see the other posts here talking about Cliff Notes and some similar products). That's not even fair use that's just like, people's opinions, man (legally speaking).
I don't think the NYT will get what they want out of this at all.
Man thinks piracy is legal
That's not a good question.
If I look out of my window and see my neighbor go to the shop, that's fine. If I use cameras and track everybody I see on the street and put them in a database, then that's problematic and illegal in many places.
Logic does not necessarily apply when scaling is involved.
But what I'm saying is that answering the question does not allow you to deduce anything about your rights; that's what I mean by "not a good question".
If we want to establish whether scenario A is fair use or not, and we all agree that A is "worse" (regarding fair use status) than some other scenario B, then if we also agree that B is not fair use, A by definition isn't either. The opposite is not true, of course: B being fair use does not imply that A has to be as well.
I find that kind of upper/lower bound logic can be pretty useful and I think it's what the parent comment was trying to do.
On a related note, that same logic is why I think Godwin's law can be a bit misapplied now and then. Sometimes bringing up nazis/Hitler can be useful to establish some ground truth in a debate (instead of just a way to imply your opponent is actually a bad person, or, possibly, an actual nazi themselves). E.g. a conversation on the morality of violence is vastly different depending on whether you agree that violence against nazis is ok or not.
Afaik not illegal in the US. You put a camera on your own private property (window), use it to record what’s happening in a public space (the street outside), and then store that data in a database (that other people can presumably access). Unless I am missing something, this scenario is perfectly legal in the US.
Inbefore I get hit with “not every country is like that at all,” NYT is based in the US and the lawsuit is filed in the US. So how a bunch of other countries deal with similar issues shouldn’t really have as much bearing on this specific case.
So like....Wikipedia, CliffNotes, encyclopedias, etc?
None of these pay royalties to original.
> Implications: The Ninth Circuit's declaration that selectively banning potential competitors from accessing and using data that is publicly available can be considered unfair competition under California law may have large implication for antitrust law. [citation needed]
> Other countries with laws to prevent monopolistic practices or anti-trust laws may also see similar disputes and prospectively judgements hailing commercial use of publicly accessible information. While there is global precedence by virtue of large companies such as Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg or Google [or LexisNexis or Westlaw] effectively using web-scraping or crawling to aggregate information from disparate sources across the web, fundamentally the judgement by Ninth Circuit fortifies the lack of enforceability of browse-wrap agreements over conduct of trade using publicly available information.
NYT articles are largely behind a paywall for everyone. That means they are not publicly available, and a competitor who was blocked from accessing or reproducing that content without a license would not be "selectively banned"
Consider the analogy from libraries that want to do data mining.
"Unfortunately, in licenses for digital scholarly content the majority of content acquired by research libraries publishers often include terms that prohibit certain uses that would otherwise be allowable under the Copyright Act. For instance, licenses may require libraries or individual researchers to negotiate for otherwise lawful activities, such as text and data mining, and to pay exorbitant fees on top of the cost of the content itself. While new regulations allow researchers to circumvent technological protection measures to access copyrighted materials, licenses for that content may include terms that explicitly prohibit this circumvention. In many cases, these activities might actually increase the value of published material; for instance, if a data-mining project yields new knowledge about a topic covered in a journal, it may very well spark new interest in that journals content. Libraries and publishers have often assumed that license terms that restrict copyright exceptions are enforceable under state contract law. There is, however, surprisingly little case law on this point."
https://www.arl.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Copyright-and...
Putting some string in a robots.txt to try to stop data collection is an amusing "solution". Should copyright owners have "Terms of Use" that limit usage for commercial "AI" purposes.
Let's say I host these, offer some indexing on it, and rewrite articles. Something like, summarise all articles on US-UK relationships over past 5 years. I charge money for it, and all I pay NYT is a monthly subscription fee. To keep things simple, let's say I never regurgitate chunks of verbatim NYT articles, maybe quite short snippets.
Is that fair use? IANAL, but doesn't sound like it. Typically I can't take a personal "tier" of a product and charge 3rd parties for derivatives of it. Say like VS Code.
A sibling comment mentions search engines. I think there's a big difference. A search engine doesn't replace the source, not at all. Rather it points me at it, and offers me the opportunity to pay for the article. Whereas either this or an LLM uses NYT content as an alternative to actually paying for an NYT subscription.
But then what do I know...