OpenAI requires NDA for employees to keep equity

Re:OpenAI requires NDA for employees to keep equity by surfingdino on Saturday May 18, 2024 @04:01AM (#40397233)

MS Word does not actively collect and process all texts for all available sources and does not offer them in recombined form. MS Word is passive whereas the whole point of an LLM is to produce output using a model trained on ingested data. It is actively processing vast amounts of texts with intent to make them available for others to use and the T&C state that the user owns the copyright to the outputs based on works of other copyright owners. LLMs give the user a CCL (Collateralised Copyright Liability, a bit like a CDO) without a way of tracing the sources used to train the model.

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Re:OpenAI requires NDA for employees to keep equity by throwaway2037 on Saturday May 18, 2024 @04:16AM (#40397290)

First, I agree with nearly everything that you wrote. Very thoughtful post! However, I have some issues with the last sentence.

    > Collateralised Copyright Liability

Is this a real legal / finance term or did you make it up?

Also, I do not follow you leap to compare LLMs to CDOs (collateralised debt obligations). And, do you specifically mean CDO or any kind of mortgage / commercial loan structured finance deal?

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Re:OpenAI requires NDA for employees to keep equity by surfingdino on Saturday May 18, 2024 @04:31AM (#40397352)

My analogy is based on the fact that nobody could see what was inside CDOs nor did they want to see, all they wanted to do was pass them on to the next sucker. It was all fun until it all blew up. LLM operators behave in the same way with copyrighted material. For context, read https://nymag.com/news/business/55687/

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Re:OpenAI requires NDA for employees to keep equity by throwaway2037 on Sunday May 19, 2024 @11:19PM (#40411915)

    > nobody could see what was inside CDOs

Absolutely not true. Where did you get that idea? When pricing the bonds from a CDO you get to see the initial collateral. As a bond owner, you receive monthly updates about any portfolio updates. Weirdly, CDOs frequently have more collateral transparency compared to commercial or residential mortgage deals.

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Re:OpenAI requires NDA for employees to keep equity by KoolKat23 on Saturday May 18, 2024 @04:34AM (#40397370)

Legally, copyright is only concerned with the specific end work. A unique or not so unique standalone object that is being scrutinized, if this analogy helps.

The process involved in obtaining that end work is completely irrelevant to any copyright case. It can be a claim against the models weights (not possible as it's fair use), or it's against the specific once off output end work (less clear), but it can't be looked at as a whole.

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Re:OpenAI requires NDA for employees to keep equity by dgoldstein0 on Saturday May 18, 2024 @04:54AM (#40397477)

I don't think that's accurate. The us copyright office last year issued guidance that basically said anything generated with ai can't be copyrighted, as human authorship/creation is required for copyright. Works can incorporate ai generated content but then those parts aren't covered by copyright.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...

So I think the law, at least as currently interpreted, does care about the process.

Though maybe you meant as to whether a new work infringes existing copyright? As this guidance is clearly about new copyright.

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Re:OpenAI requires NDA for employees to keep equity by KoolKat23 on Saturday May 18, 2024 @05:08AM (#40397540)

These are two sides of the same coin, and what I'm saying still stands. This is talking about who you attribute authorship to when copyrighting a specific work. Basically on the application form, the author must be a human. The reason it's worth them clarifying is because they've received applications that attributed AI's, and legal persons do exist that aren't human (such as companies), they're just making it clear it has to be human.

Who created the work, it's the user who instructed the AI (it's a tool), you can't attribute it to the AI. It would be the equivalent of Photoshop being attributed as co-author on your work.

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Re:OpenAI requires NDA for employees to keep equity by arrowsmith on Saturday May 18, 2024 @05:56AM (#40397696)

Couldn't you just generate it with AI then say you wrote it? How could anyone prove you wrong?

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Re:OpenAI requires NDA for employees to keep equity by KoolKat23 on Saturday May 18, 2024 @06:10AM (#40397754)

That's what you're supposed to do. No need to hide it either :).

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