[HN Gopher] NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all G...
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NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances
Author : justinc8687
Score : 477 points
Date : 2023-12-28 05:07 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| biglyburrito wrote:
| TLDR:
|
| "The suit seeks nothing less than the erasure of both any GPT
| instances that the parties have trained using material from the
| Times, as well as the destruction of the datasets that were used
| for the training. It also asks for a permanent injunction to
| prevent similar conduct in the future. The Times also wants
| money, lots and lots of money: "statutory damages, compensatory
| damages, restitution, disgorgement, and any other relief that may
| be permitted by law or equity.""
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Wow they want to kill it. I wonder if we've just lived through
| the golden Napster era of LLMs.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Just train on NYT articles no longer in copyright. We may be
| better for it.
| mynegation wrote:
| Next thing you know ChatGPT gives you the best way to crank
| your automobile and take good care of your crinoline.
| vidarh wrote:
| Or buy them. OpenAI market cap is many times NYT.
|
| If we see court judgements start to go copyright owners
| way, we will also see a scramble from AI companies to buy
| the few publishers with enough data to be worth buying, and
| to create works for hire to replace the rest.
|
| In the long run a copyright ruling like that will be a boon
| for OpenAI and all other players with deep enough pockets
| to do so, and massively harm everyone else who will
| suddenly find it far harder to build models legally.
| rhdunn wrote:
| So that would mean articles from the 1920s, provided that
| the authors of those articles have been dead for 70 years,
| or longer in some other countries.
| suby wrote:
| They may just want a licensing deal.
| weikju wrote:
| They're already working on it with Apple (see my other
| reply in this discussion), so I wouldn't doubt that this is
| another salvo in the same battle.
| chongli wrote:
| This is what lawyers are paid for. They ask for the max because
| there's no harm in doing so. Everyone knows there's little
| meaning to that.
| greggsy wrote:
| They always go for the max, knowing that they will settle
| somewhere closer to the expected rate.
| weikju wrote:
| Probably has something to do with impending deals between NYT and
| major companies, e.g.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-
| news-...
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/22/24012730/apple-ai-
| models...
| outside1234 wrote:
| Seems reasonable - they probably broke the TOS of the site
| thallium205 wrote:
| What if they OCR'd the newspapers? No ToS there.
| product-render wrote:
| It's at least partially a copyright claim, isn't it? So the
| method -- OCR or scraping -- doesn't matter, I think.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there is still a copyright also for the
| physical newspaper.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| For the paper or the author? What exactly was the licensing
| agreement for Op-Ed authors in 1962?
| bloppe wrote:
| Read the article. It's not difficult to get ChatGPT to
| regurgitate recent, obviously copyrighted articles,
| verbatim.
| thallium205 wrote:
| It will be equally easy for ChatGPT to rewrite
| copyrighted content that makes the output materially
| different for a copyright claim to succeed also.
| bloppe wrote:
| Then ChatGPT should do that.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Did OpenAI agree to those ToS? If not, I think (IANAL) LinkedIn
| was kind enough to give precedent that it's irrelevant.
|
| ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn )
| KETHERCORTEX wrote:
| On the other hand, NYT website willingly gave out all the
| information without imposing limitations. Seeing terms of
| service requires visiting a separate page, they aren't seen
| immediately upon visiting the website. Understanding and
| accepting the terms also requires a human interaction.
|
| robots.txt on nytimes.com now disallows indexing by GPTBot, so
| there's an argument against automated information acquisition
| starting from some moment, but before some moment they weren't
| explicitly against that.
| arrrg wrote:
| Seems weird to argue that you have to speak up if you don't
| want something done to you or else you consent to everything.
|
| I do think that's the case for some things but especially for
| new things that doesn't seem like a common sense
| understanding of the world.
| KETHERCORTEX wrote:
| > Seems weird to argue that you have to speak up if you
| don't want something done to you or else you consent to
| everything.
|
| If you don't want people to get at your land, setting up
| even a small fence creates an explicit indication of
| limitations. Just like the record in robots.txt I mentioned
| earlier.
|
| New York Times also doesn't limit article text content if
| you just request HTML, which is typical for automated
| cases. But they impose th limits imposed on users viewing
| the pages in browser with Javascript, CSS and everything
| else. So they clearly:
|
| 1. Have a way to determine the user's eligibility for
| reading the full article on server side.
|
| 2. Don't limit the content for typical automated cases on
| server side.
|
| 3. Have a way to track the activity of not logged in users,
| determining the eligibility for access. So it's reasonable
| to assume that they had records of repeated access from the
| same origin, but didn't impose any limitations before some
| time.
|
| So there are enough reasons to think that robots are
| welcome to read the articles fully. I'm not talking about
| copyright violations here, only about the ability to
| receive the data.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| It's obviously a frivolous suit that will only net at best a
| ceremonial victory for NYTimes: 8 figure max payout and a promise
| to not use NYtimes material in the future.
|
| The trajectory and value to society of OpenAI vs NYtimes could
| not be greater. They have won no favors in the court of public
| opinion with their frequent misinformation. It's all just a big
| waste of time, the last of the old guard flailing against the
| march of progress.
|
| And even hypothetially if they managed to get OpenAI to delete
| ChatGPT they'd be hated forever.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| > They have won no favors in the court of public opinion with
| their frequent misinformation.
|
| You mean GPT here, right?
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| ChatGPT only advertises itself as a fancy autocomplete. There
| is a disclaimer that it may produce output that appears
| correct but isn't. NYtimes written material purports itself
| to be the truth, thus shouldn't be held to the same standards
| as a generative AI obviously.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| I think what we should focus on is the volume of
| misinformation in general, not the provenance of it.
|
| The NYT may produce misinformation but it aims not to, and
| its staff of human writers are limited in the quantity that
| they can produce. They also publish corrections.
|
| GPT enables anyone who can pay to generate a virtually
| unlimited volume of misinformation, launder it into
| 'articles' with fake bylines and saturate the internet with
| garbage.
|
| I think we need to focus on the damage done.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Well that's true for any large language model. As long as
| they exist there will be a deluge of bot written text
| producible for any purpose. At this point there is no
| getting the cat back into the bag.
|
| In that case the bigger danger is Open source LLM's.
| OpenAI at least monitors the use of their endpoints for
| obvious harm.
| realusername wrote:
| > The NYT may produce misinformation but it aims not to,
| and its staff of human writers are limited in the
| quantity that they can produce. They also publish
| corrections.
|
| Except when it affects their bottom line of course, they
| publicly lied on how meta tags work during the lawsuits
| against Google to get more money (like most newspapers
| did). And I have no doubt that they will extensively lie
| once again on how LLM really work.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Nobody is looking at this suit as applying to the Times
| exclusively - and neither will the courts.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I've never really known The New York Times to file frivolous
| lawsuits.
| strangus wrote:
| Next up, Microsoft acquires the New York Times forming MSNYT
| playingalong wrote:
| ... New Roman
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| This is not impossible, and perhaps not even unlikely
| sackfield wrote:
| Something I have wondered about LLMs and training data is the
| idea that the biggest content producers on the internet now have
| their world view and tone echoed disproportionately as part of
| the next big wave of technology. This is incredibly impactful
| (although admittedly I don't know how to turn that into a
| profit). Is there some long term impact of removing the New York
| Times from training data that means it won't be part of the LLMs
| corpus going forward that is unforeseen?
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| I read a NYT article and publish a summary of facts that I
| learned: totally legit.
|
| Train a model on NYT text that outputs a summary of facts that it
| learned: OMG literally murder.
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| That's why there will be a legalization of the fair use. Just
| let your intellectual to be used for free training material is
| not sustainable.
|
| Also remember copyright laws was not there in the first place.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Because it's not just summarizing the bare facts. It's a
| parrot.
| bad_user wrote:
| Fair use is intended for humans, much like copyright in
| general.
|
| If you can't copyright AI-generated pieces, then why would fair
| use apply to LLMs?
| mdekkers wrote:
| > Fair use is intended for humans.
|
| Is it? Can you quote relevant legislation or case law?
| bloppe wrote:
| Sounds like you didn't read the article. Here's a better
| synoposis:
|
| I read a NYT article and publish an exact copy of that article
| on my website: copyright infringement.
|
| Train a model on NYT text and it outputs an exact copy of that
| text: also copyright infringement.
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| So presumably when they fix that issue (which, if the text
| matches exactly, should be trivially easy) then would you
| accept that as a sufficient remedy?
| tarruda wrote:
| > then would you accept that as a sufficient remedy?
|
| Probably not until they pay him a hefty copyright fee.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Copyright infringement is not avoided by changing some text
| so it isn't an exact clone of the source.
|
| Determining whether a work violates a copyright requires
| holistic consideration of the similarity of the work to the
| copyrighted material, the purpose of the work, and the
| work's impact on the copyright holder.
|
| There is not an algorithm for this, cases are decided on by
| people.
|
| There are algorithms that could detect obvious violations
| of copyright, such as the one you suggest which looks for
| exact matches to copyrighted material. However, there are
| many potential outputs, or patterns of output, which would
| be copyright violation and would not be caught by this
| trivial test.
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| And you think that it would be impossible to train a
| model to avoid outputs that are substantially similar to
| training data?
| Vegenoid wrote:
| I certainly don't think it's impossible, but I think it
| is hard problem that won't be solved in the immediate
| future, and creators of data used for training are right
| to seek to stop wide availability of LLMs that
| regurgitate information they worked hard to obtain.
| bloppe wrote:
| Basically, ya. It's not enough to change just a couple
| words around. But ya, there's probably _some_ way to
| engineer around the problem.
| slyall wrote:
| A small number of outputs of ChatGPT are close enough to
| training articles to be (probably) copyright infringement.
|
| What does that mean?
|
| Look up "substantial non-infringing use" and this little
| court case:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive.
| ...
|
| Now spend a few million on lawyers and roll your dice.
| postexitus wrote:
| In Sony vs. Universal case, Sony is the producer of a tool
| where the consumer uses to "time-shift" a broadcast that
| they legally are allowed to view. Similarly, you can rip
| your own CDs or photocopy your own books. This case never
| made reselling those content legal. OpenAI does not train
| ChatGPT on the content you own - they do it on some
| undisclosed amount of data that you may or may not have a
| legal right to access, and then move on and (is shown to)
| reproduce it nearly verbatim - they may even charge you for
| the pleasure.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Companies that have content all see dollar signs.
|
| NYT won't mind if you use their content to train LLMs - as long
| as they get a commission. Reddit will shut down their free API
| and make you pay to get training content. Discord is going to be
| selling content for AI training too - if they haven't already
| done so. Twitter is doing it.
|
| They didn't care before because LLMs were just experiments. Now
| we're talking trillions of dollars of value.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > They didn't care before because LLMs were just experiments.
| Now we're talking trillions of dollars of value.
|
| Can you make the argument this was their fault for not having
| forward vision/being asleep at the wheel and "accidentally, in
| hindsight" letting OpenAI/others have free, open, unlimited
| access to their content?
| bloppe wrote:
| Basically none of the training material for GPT was used
| under an "unlimited" license. There are very important legal
| limitations. GPT just doesn't care much about them.
| aurareturn wrote:
| No, I can't. It's just an observation with no personal
| opinion.
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| "They" also include the people working there. Why someone work
| with full time writing articles should give the work for free
| just let someone to train it and make money out of it as a
| consequence?
| tucnak wrote:
| >Why someone work with full time writing articles should give
| the work for free
|
| They are not giving it out "for free", in fact they're being
| paid by their employer to write these articles. Moreover, the
| writers themselves stand noth' to gain from their past
| writings financially as they don't belong to the ownership
| structure of the business.
| bloppe wrote:
| > the writers themselves stand noth' to gain from their
| past writings financially as they don't belong to the
| ownership structure of the business.
|
| This is a dumb argument. We're not just talking about
| ancient articles. We're talking about new content,
| including content that is yet to be written.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Their ability to make money in the future is directly tied
| to their employers' ability to make money with their
| content. This is a closed financial loop. If OpenAI or any
| other AI company wants in, they should pay a licensing fee
| or get the laws changed, not just assume that they can take
| what they want and pretend like there are no negative
| consequences for the creator or the rights-holder.
| malwrar wrote:
| In this limited example, are there such consequences? Are
| people dropping NYT subscriptions because they trust
| chatgpt to inform them of current events? I don't buy it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| No one is pretending there are no "there are no negative
| consequences for the creator or the rights-holder". Of
| course there are. But this is a story of rights-holders,
| who've already outgrown their usefulness, wanting to tap
| themselves into money stream they are not entitled to.
|
| _ChatGPT isn 't competing with NYT on a core
| competency_. No one uses LLMs for original news
| reporting. They're obviously incapable of doing that, by
| virtue of not being there on the scene or able to
| independently research a topic, maintain relationships
| with sources, etc. What ChatGPT can do is quote/reproduce
| some parts of past articles, _and reason from them_. Or
| at least produce new text that 's somewhat related to the
| old text.
|
| The threat to NYT is this: ChatGPT is much better
| bullshitter than they are, so it reduces NYT to its core
| competency: providing original information. Which is all
| it should be doing in the first place. But instead, NYT
| wants to not only keep the bullshitting part of its
| revenue, but also take a cut or destroy the much greater
| and _much more useful_ part of where this all feeds a
| general-purpose language model.
| tucnak wrote:
| >This is a closed financial loop.
|
| This is a badly-formulated conjecture, or worse,
| ultimately selective reading of "social credit" which
| only purpose is serving your argument; it has nothing to
| do with economics. I'm sorry, but I'm not convinced.
| amadvance wrote:
| > Why someone work with full time writing articles should
| give the work for free
|
| OpenSource developers did that ;)
| KETHERCORTEX wrote:
| When open source developers do that, they also include an
| explicit licensing information that lists cases when the
| usage is allowed and restricted. So even if the code is
| open source and licensed under GPL, its usage in a closed
| source product like ChatGPT is not allowed.
| fsckboy wrote:
| GPL code usage in closed source ChatGPT is allowed "for
| internal use"; it just would not be allowed to distribute
| binaries of ChatGPT that are closed source without making
| source available; also a GPL3 license violation to allow
| online access to a ChatGPT program that used GPL3 code
| without making source available.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| With the ways NYTimes has degraded since 2010 even if people
| there are working for free, they're still being overpaid. The
| only adequate section there is the food.
| johngladtj wrote:
| You understand that news aren't copyrightable right?
|
| You're fighting a scarecrow that doesn't exist...
| mvdtnz wrote:
| NYT do not "have" content, they create content. It's their
| raison d'etre.
| aurareturn wrote:
| They have content that LLMs want to use in training -
| millions of historical articles.
| esperent wrote:
| They created that content. It's an important distinction to
| make as compared to Reddit or Facebook where the users
| created the content.
| midasuni wrote:
| The journalists created the content for the NYT, the
| users created it for Facebook. Both received something in
| return for their effort, and the content ended up being
| owned by NYT/facebook
| fasterik wrote:
| I've been arguing since ChatGPT came out that LLMs should fall
| under fair use as a "transformative work". I'm not a lawyer and
| this is just my non-expert opinion, but it will be interesting to
| see what the legal system has to say about this.
| mynegation wrote:
| Suit claims that GPT reproduced passages from NYT almost
| verbatim.
| rvz wrote:
| Precisely.
|
| This tired _' fair use'_ excuses from AI bros whilst the GPT
| has reproduced the article text verbatim, word for word and
| it being monetized without the permission from the copyright
| holder and source (NYT) is an obvious copyright violation
| 101. Full stop.
|
| Again, just like Getty v. Stability, this copyright lawsuit
| will end in a licensing deal. Apple played it smart with
| their choice with licensing deals to train their GPT [0]. But
| this time, OpenAI knew they could get a license to train on
| NYT articles but _chose_ not to.
|
| [0] https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/22/apple-wants-to-train-its-
| ai-w...
| throwup238 wrote:
| The four factors considered in a fair use test:
| the purpose and character of the use the nature of
| the copyrighted work the amount and substantiality
| of the portion taken the effect of the use upon the
| potential market.
|
| Literally every single one of these factors has very
| complicated precedent and each one is an open question when
| it comes to AI. Since fair use is a balancing test this
| could go any way.
|
| Stability took the easy way out because they didn't have
| billions of dollars to play around with and Microsoft to
| back them. Let's see what OpenAI does but calling everyone
| who disagrees with your naive interpretation of fair use
| "AI bros" is doing everyone a disservice.
| chatmasta wrote:
| > AI bros
|
| What (or whom) do you consider to be an "AI bro?"
|
| This sort of ad hominem generalization usually accompanies
| a weak argument.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It seems to be used by people who've previously used the
| term "tech bro."
| irq wrote:
| Not saying I agree with this labeling, but it means
| approximately the same thing as "crypto bro", but for AI
| beau_g wrote:
| Young males that wear Tensorflow branded muscle tank tops
| and drive Mitsubishi Eclipse convertibles with the vanity
| plate OVERFIT. They are everywhere these days.
| jakderrida wrote:
| Thank you for the absurd visual. The vanity plate,
| especially, was worth saving for last. Somehow, the car
| is well suited, also. Love how they prefer Tensorflow
| over Pytorch, too.
| danielbln wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/4tF7q8M.jpg
| vidarh wrote:
| The text generation is getting quite decent. The limbs
| disappearing into the car are somewhat less impressive.
| vidarh wrote:
| I generally tend to downvote comments that use "x bros"
| for pretty much any x on sight for that reason. It's
| exceedingly rare for such a comment to be much more than
| a thinly veiled insult with little substance. Sometimes I
| might even agree with the insult, but it's still rarely
| appropriate here.
| dahart wrote:
| I don't doubt it does. It's easy to get it to spit out long
| answers from Stack Overflow verbatim, I've done it. Maybe
| some of the "transformative" nature of the LLM output is the
| removal of any authorship, copyright, license, and edit
| history information. ;) The point here is to supplant Google
| as the portal of information, right? It doesn't have new
| information, but it's pretty good at remixing the words from
| multiple sources, when it has multiple sources. One possible
| reason for their legal woes wrt copyright is that it's also
| great at memorizing things that only have one source. My
| college Markov-chain text predictor would do the same thing
| and easily get stuck in local regions if it couldn't match
| something else.
| __loam wrote:
| I don't think these can replace search engines.
| lodovic wrote:
| I'm sure the NYT uses dictionaries, encyclopaedias and style
| books verbatim as well. And they don't invent the facts they
| write about. As journalists they are compiling and passing
| along other knowledge. You usually don't get a piece of their
| income when a journalist quotes you verbatim (people usually
| don't get paid for interviews).
| madeofpalk wrote:
| If the NYT reproduces other content verbatim too much, it
| will get in trouble.
| threeseed wrote:
| NYT doesn't reproduce the contents of the dictionary or
| encyclopaedia.
|
| And even if they did it will be fine because those sources
| allow for it.
|
| The point is that OpenAI never asked NYT for permission to
| use their data.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| It's inevitable that this question ends up at the supreme
| court. And the sooner the better IMO. It's clearly fair use.
| Generative agents will be seen legally as no different than a
| human artist leveraging the summation of their influences to
| create a new work.
| agentgumshoe wrote:
| Clearly fair use? What if I pay ChatGPT to give me the NYT
| article it sourced verbatim as stored (i.e. without referring
| me to the NYT source)?
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| It's not stored in ChatGPT actually, unlike Google's web
| search cache where it is stored verbatim, can be recalled
| perfectly, and is still fair use.
|
| Fair use has nothing to do with reproducibility. LLMs are
| more clearly fair use than a search engine cache and those
| court cases are long settled. There's no world in which
| OpenAI doesn't win this entire thing.
| simion314 wrote:
| >It's inevitable that this question ends up at the supreme
| court. And the sooner the better IMO. It's clearly fair use.
| Generative agents will be seen legally as no different than a
| human artist leveraging the summation of their influences to
| create a new work.
|
| Why do you think the architecture is important? If I have a
| computer program and it outputs the an entire copyrighted
| poem then the answer to "is this copyright violation" SHOULD
| NOT depends on the architecture of the program.
| dahart wrote:
| This seems like a reasonable opinion when you think about the
| training data size and imagine that any given output is some
| kind of interpolation of some unknown large number of training
| examples all from different people. If it's borrowing snippets
| from tens or hundreds or thousands of sources, then who's
| copyrights are being violated? Remixing in music seems to be
| withstanding some amount of legal scrutiny, as long as the
| remix is borrowing from multiple sources and the music is
| clearly different and original.
|
| It gets harder to stand behind a blanket claim that LLMs or any
| AI we've got falls under fair use when they keep repeatedly
| reproducing complete and identifiable individual works and
| clearly violating copyright laws in specific instances. The
| models might be remixing and/or transformative most of the
| time, but we have proof that they don't do that every time nor
| all the time... yet. Maybe the lawsuits will be the impetus we
| need to fix the AIs so they don't reproduce specific works, and
| thus make the fair use claim solid and actually defensible?
| agentgumshoe wrote:
| What if I ask ChatGPT to print the article verbatim as sourced,
| from its own dataset?
| cjbprime wrote:
| It doesn't have database access to its own training dataset;
| it only has access to the weights it lossily-compressed that
| training dataset into.
| kragen wrote:
| this was predicted in the very influential epic 2014 video in
| 02004
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s (the original is
| flash and has thus been consigned to the memory hole, so we are
| left with this poor-quality conversion)
|
| 36": 'however, the press as you know it has ceased to exist'
|
| 40": '20th-century news organizations are an afterthought; a
| lonely remnant of a not-too-distant past'
|
| 2'11": 'also in 2002, google launches google news, a news portal.
| news organizations cry foul. google news is edited entirely by
| computers'
|
| 5'13": 'the news wars of 2010 are notable for the fact that no
| actual news organizations take part. googlezon finally checkmates
| microsoft with a feature the software giant cannot match: using a
| new algorithm, googlezon's computers construct new stories,
| dynamically stripping sentences and facts from all content
| sources, and recombining them. the computer writes a new story
| for every user'
|
| 5'55": 'in 2011 the slumbering fourth estate awakes to make its
| first and final stand. the new york times company sues googlezon,
| claiming that the company's fact-stripping robots are a violation
| of copyright law. the case goes all the way to the supreme court'
|
| they didn't get the details exactly right, but overall the
| accuracy is astounding
|
| however, that may be a hyperstition artifact in this timeline
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIC_2014 (i thought epic 2014
| might be the only flash video to hae a wikipedia article about
| it, but then i looked and found five others)
| groceryheist wrote:
| The suit demonstrates instances where ChatGTP / Bing Copilot copy
| from the NYT verbatim. I think it is hard to argue that such
| copying constitutes "fair use". However, OAI/MS should be able to
| fix this within the current paradigm: Just learn to recognize and
| punish plagiarism via RLHF.
|
| However, the suit goes far beyond claiming that such copying
| violates their copyright: "Unauthorized copying of Times Works
| without payment to train LLMs is a substitutive use that is not
| justified by any transformative purpose."
|
| This is a strong claim that just downloading articles into
| training data is what violates the copyright. That GTP outputs
| verbatim copies is a red herring. Hopefully the judge(s) will
| notice and direct focus on the interesting, high-stakes, and
| murky legal issues raised when we ask: What about a model can (or
| can't) be "transformative"?
| spacecadet wrote:
| Transformations are happening. Maybe if the output is verbatim
| afterwards, than that says something about the outputs
| originality all along... or am I a troll?
| jarrell_mark wrote:
| Anything + 2 and then minus two is back to the original
| thing. This says more about the transformations than the
| source material.
| spacecadet wrote:
| I know, I was trying to be funny, but hey- this
| community...
| dathery wrote:
| They're talking about transformative with regard to copyright
| law where it is an important part of determining fair use,
| not the dictionary definition you're using here.
|
| I can't take NY Times articles, translate them into Spanish,
| and then sell the translations under fair use, even though
| clearly I've transformed the original article content.
| peyton wrote:
| Well yeah, copying a work and using it for its original
| expressive purpose isn't fair use, no? You have to use it for a
| transformative purpose.
|
| Suppose I'm selling subscriptions to the New Jersey Times, a
| site which simply downloads New York Times articles and passes
| them through an autoencoder with some random noise. It serves
| the exact same purpose as the New York Times website, except I
| make the money. Is that fair use?
| echelon wrote:
| > Well yeah, copying a work and using it for its original
| expressive purpose isn't fair use, no? You have to use it for
| a transformative purpose.
|
| They transformed the weights.
|
| Just like reading the article transforms _yours_.
|
| As for verbatim reproduction, I'm pretty sure brains are
| capable of reproducing song lyrics, musical melodies, common
| symbols ("cool S"), and lots of other things verbatim too.
|
| Those quotes from Dr. King's speech that you remember are
| copyrighted, you know?
| JambalayaJim wrote:
| This comment is just blatant anthropomorphizing of ML
| models. You have no idea if reading an article "transforms
| weights" in a human mind, and regardless, they aren't
| legally the same thing anyway.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Modern neuroscience does highly suggest this is
| essentially what's happening.
| echelon wrote:
| > they aren't legally the same thing anyway.
|
| They should be.
| JambalayaJim wrote:
| Why? A human being isn't infinitely scalable; they're
| just different. It's the same thing as going to a movie
| theatre to watch a movie vs. recording it with a camera.
| echelon wrote:
| A human churning butter, spinning cotton, or acting as a
| bank teller isn't infinitely scalable either. This is
| orthogonal to the point.
|
| Times change. We're industrializing information creation
| and consumption (the latter is mostly here already), and
| we can't be stuck in the old copyright regime. It'll be
| useless in very short order.
|
| All this road bump will do will give the giant megacorps
| time to ink deals, solidify their lead, and trounce open
| source. Twenty years on, the pace of content creation
| will be as rapid as thought itself and we'll kick
| ourselves for cementing their lead.
|
| This is a transitional period between two wildly
| different worlds.
| cornel_io wrote:
| If they could find a single person who in natural use (e.g.
| not as they were trying to gather data for this lawsuit) has
| ever _actually_ used ChatGPT as a direct substitution for a
| NYT subscription, I 'd support this lawsuit.
|
| But nobody would do that, because ChatGPT is a really shitty
| way to read NYT articles (it's stale, it can't reliably
| reproduce them, etc.). All that is valuable about it is the
| way that it transforms and operates on that data in
| conjunction with all the other data that it has.
|
| The real world use of ChatGPT is very transformative, even if
| you can trick it into behaving in ways that are not. If the
| courts act intelligently they should at least weigh that as
| part of their decision.
| peyton wrote:
| It's more of a thought experiment. Here's another with more
| commercial applications:
|
| Suppose I start a service called "EastlawAI" by downloading
| the Westlaw database and hiring a team of comedians to
| write very funny lawyer jokes.
|
| I take Westlaw cases and lawyer jokes and feed them to my
| autoencoder. I also learn a mapping from user queries to
| decoder inputs.
|
| I sell an API and advertise it to startups as capable of
| answering any legal question in a funny way. Another
| company comes along with an API to make the output less
| funny.
|
| Have I created a competitor to Westlaw by copying Westlaw's
| works for their original expressive purpose and exposing it
| as an intermediary? Or have I simply trained the world's
| most informative lawyer joke generator that some of my
| customers happen to use for legal analysis by layering
| other tools atop my output?
|
| Did I need to download Westlaw cases to make my lawyer joke
| generator? Are the jokes a fair-use smokescreen for
| repackaging commercially valuable copyrighted data? Does my
| joke generator impact Westlaw in the market? Depends,
| right?
| whoopsie wrote:
| That's nonsense piracy. I never intend to own a truck, so
| when I need to haul a little something I go to Home Depot
| and steal a Ford off the lot for an hour? What if I stole
| all your commits, plucked the hard lines out of the
| ceremony, and then launched an equivalent feature the same
| week as you did, but for a competing software company?
| Would you or your employer deserve to get paid for my use
| of the slice of your work that was specifically useful for
| me? Yeah, and then some extra for theft.
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| awful comparison
| hn_acker wrote:
| > Well yeah, copying a work and using it for its original
| expressive purpose isn't fair use, no? You have to use it for
| a transformative purpose.
|
| To be clear, whether the use of the original work is
| transformative is one key consideration within one of the
| four prongs of fair use. The prong "purpose and character of
| the use" can be fulfilled by other conditions [1]. For
| example, using the original work within a classroom for
| education purposes is not transformative, but can fulfill the
| same "purpose and character of the use" prong. Whether the
| use is for profit and to which extent are other
| considerations within that prong. A profit purpose doesn't
| automatically fail the purpose prong, and a non-profit
| purpose doesn't automatically pass the purpose prong.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#1._Purpose_and_cha
| rac...
| visarga wrote:
| > Just learn to recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF.
|
| This is not a RLHF problem. What I was expecting them to do is
| to keep a bloom filter of ngrams for known copyrighted content,
| such as enumerating all sets of n=7 consecutive words in an
| article, and validate against it. The model would only output
| at maximum n-1 words that look verbatim from the source.
|
| But this will blow up in their face. Let's see:
|
| - AI companies will start investing much more in content
| attribution
|
| - The new content attribution tools will be applied on all
| human written articles as well, because anyone could be using
| GPT in secret
|
| - Then people will start seeing a chilling effect on creativity
|
| - We must also check NYT against all the other sources, not
| everything the write is original
| groceryheist wrote:
| Maybe the bloom filter solution is enough, but I wonder.
|
| - Paraphrasing n=7 words (and quite a few more) within a
| sentence can easily be fair use.
|
| - As n gets big, the bloom filter has to also.
|
| If/when attribution is solved for LLMs (and not fake
| attribution like from Bing or Perplexity) then creators can
| be compensated when their works are used in AI outputs. If
| compensation is high enough this can greatly incentivize
| creativity, perhaps to the point of realizing "free culture"
| visions from the late 90s.
| visarga wrote:
| As n-gram length grows, we are still going to have the same
| number of ngrams, they go through a hashing function and
| indexed in the bloom filter as usual. The number of n-grams
| size n in a text is text_length - ngram_length + 1.
| groceryheist wrote:
| The number of _unique_ values in the bloom filter will go
| up ~exponentially with n. So to control the false
| positive rate the bloom filter has to grow.
| visarga wrote:
| At large enough ngram size there would be very few
| collisions. You can take for example this text and try in
| Google with quotes, it won't find anything matching
| exactly.
|
| I tested this 6-gram "it won't find anything matching
| exactly", no match. Almost anything we write has never
| been said exactly like that before.
| groceryheist wrote:
| Yes and the fact that the number of unique phrases grows
| so quickly with n is why the bloom filter needs to grow
| so that hashed n-grams don't collide.
| dleeftink wrote:
| > it won't find anything matching exactly
|
| This approach is probably inadequate. In my line of (NLP)
| research I find many things have been said exactly many,
| many times over.
|
| You can try this out yourself by grouping and counting
| strings using the many publically available Bigquery
| corpora for various substring lengths and offsets, e.g.
| [0-16]; [0-32]; [0-64] substring lengths at different
| offsets.
| geysersam wrote:
| > if compensation is high enough
|
| Who pays the compensation? If it's the user, why wouldn't
| they just buy the authors work directly? Why go through the
| LLM middleman?
| groceryheist wrote:
| The LLM users/middlemen pay. The user probably pays less
| than they would have to pay the author. The LMM provides
| information retrieval / discovery.
| starttoaster wrote:
| > If it's the user, why wouldn't they just buy the
| authors work directly? Why go through the LLM middleman?
|
| If it's the user, why wouldn't they just buy the DVDs
| directly? Why go through the Netflix middleman?
|
| A retort to this would be that both NYT and ChatGPT are
| on the internet, so it's no added fuss of hopping in my
| car, driving to Walmart, and picking up a DVD case. My
| response to it would be that both the LLM and Netflix are
| content aggregators to the user. I can read the NYT, or I
| can read the NYT summary on ChatGPT and ask it for life
| advice with my pet hamster, or ask it how to reverse a
| linked list in bash.
| sideshowb wrote:
| I like the idea but seems like there would be big problems.
| Like detecting if a work is reworded. Or a large number of
| sources have all slightly influenced a small response -
| isn't that pretty much considered new knowledge?
|
| Then there's the issue that however you credit attribution,
| it creates a game of enshittified content creation with the
| aim of being attributed as often as possible, regardless of
| whether the content really offered anything that wasn't out
| there already.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I think it is an RLHF problem and that you are right - this
| will blow up in the faces of the NYT.
|
| Specifically, the NYT examples all seem to be cases where
| they asked the AI to repeat their articles verbatim? So they
| ask it to violate copyright and because it's a helpful bot
| with a good memory, it does so.
|
| Solution: teach the model to refuse requests to repeat
| articles verbatim. It's easily capable of recognizing when
| it's being asked to do that. And that's exactly what OpenAI
| have now done.
|
| So the direct problem the NYT is complaining about - a
| paywall bypass - is already rectified. Now it would seem to
| me like the case is quite weak. They could demand OpenAI pay
| them damages for the time ChatGPT wasn't refusing, but
| wouldn't they have to prove damages actually happened? It
| seems unlikely many people used ChatGPT as a paywall bypass
| for the NYT specifically in the past year. It only knows old
| articles. OpenAI could be ordered to search their logs for
| cases where this happened, for example, and then the NYT
| could be ordered to show their working for the value of
| displaying a single old article to a non-subscriber, and from
| that damages could be computed. But it wouldn't be a lot.
|
| That's presumably why the case goes further and argues that
| OpenAI is in violation even when it isn't repeating text
| verbatim. That's the only way the NYT can get any significant
| money out of this situation.
|
| But this case seems much weaker to me. Beyond all the obvious
| human analogies, there is precedent in the case of search
| engines where they crawl - and the NYT let them crawl -
| specifically to enable the creation of a derived data
| structure. Search engine indexes are understood to be fair
| use, and they actually _do_ repeat parts of the page verbatim
| in their snippets. Google once even showed cached versions of
| whole pages. And browser makers all allow extensions in their
| stores that strip ads and bypass paywalls, and the NYT hasn
| 't sued them over that either.
| cycomanic wrote:
| This is not how copyright works though. The verbatim
| quoting of articles is because when people brought up these
| questions initially the argument was that the NN doesn't
| really contain the training data or really just in an
| abstract, condensed way that does not constitute copying of
| the content.
|
| This demonstrates that no, the NN actually does contain the
| full articles, copied into the NN. Do you think any normal
| person would get away with copying MS windows by e.g.
| zipping it together with some other OS on the same medium.
| Why should we let OpenAI get away with this?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Search indexes contain exact copies of the pages they
| index, and that isn't a copyright violation.
|
| _> Why should we let OpenAI get away with this?_
|
| IP rights, like other private property rights, are a
| compromise between creators and consumers. What "should"
| be the case is essentially an argument about what balance
| creates the best overall outcomes. LLMs, for now, require
| large amounts of text to train, so the question is one of
| whether we want LLMs to exist or not. That's really a
| question for Congress and not the courts, but it'll be
| decided in the courts first.
| dyno12345 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W-shingling
| jahewson wrote:
| Many instances of fair use involve verbatim copying. The
| important questions surround the situation in which that
| happens - not so much the copying. NYT is in uncharted
| territory here.
| fsckboy wrote:
| in the same way that machines are not able to claim
| copyright, they aren't allowed to claim other legal rights
| either, like "fair use".
|
| The entity which owns ChatGPT is apparently maintaining a
| copy of the entirety of the New York Times archive within the
| ChatGPT knowledge base. That they extract some fair use
| snippets (they would claim) from it would still be fruit of a
| poisoned tree, no?
|
| (disclaimer: I'm pro AI, anti copyright, especially anti
| elitist NY Times; but pro rule of law)
| colechristensen wrote:
| I think there is some point between fifty years ago and
| last week in which the copyright for the content of
| newspapers should be public domain. That part of copyright
| needs to be fixed.
|
| Your creative work does deserve at least some period of
| exclusive rights for you. Definitely not so much that your
| grandchildren get to quibble about it well into retirement.
| But also whatever the number 3 or 4 most valuable company
| in the world doesn't get to scrape your content daily to
| repackage and sell as intelligent systems.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _But also whatever the number 3 or 4 most valuable
| company in the world doesn't get to scrape your content
| daily to repackage and sell as intelligent systems._
|
| Here's a thing though: for 99%+ of that content, being
| turned into feedstock for ML model training is about _the
| only valuable thing that came of its existence_.
|
| If it were not for world-ending danger of too smart an AI
| being developed too quickly, I'd vote for exempting ML
| training from copyright altogether, today - it's hard to
| overstate just how much more useful any copyrighted
| content is for society as LLM training data, than as
| whatever it was created for originally.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Except if you do that, you will see the number of content
| producers plummet quite quickly, and then you won't have
| any new training data to train new LLMs on.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Would it not logically follow that nothing of value would
| be lost, even if that were the case? From the point of
| view of LLMs and content creators, I would treat
| potential loss of future content being created like I
| would treat a lost sale. LLMs have value now because of
| training performed on content that already exists. There
| must be diminishing returns for certain types of content
| relative to others. Certain content is only of value if
| it is timely, and going forward, content that derives its
| worth from timeliness would find its creation and
| associated costs of production and acquisition self-
| justifying. If content isn't of value to humans now or in
| the future, nor even of value to LLMs now or in the
| foreseeable future, not even hypothetically, then why
| should we decry or mourn its loss or absence or failure
| to be created or produced or sold?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That's like saying that if a competitor can take your
| products from your warehouse and sell them for pennies on
| the dollar, your business has no value. The point is
| that, to some extent, OpenAI is selling access to NYT
| content for much cheaper than NYT, while paying exactly 0
| to NYT for this content. Obviously, the NYT content costs
| the NYT more than 0 to produce, so they just can't
| compete on price with OpenAI, for their own content.
|
| Note that I don't see any major problem if only articles
| that were, say, more than 5 or 10 years old were being
| used. I don't think the current length of copyright makes
| any sense. But there is a big difference from last year's
| archive vs today's news.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| For the sake of argument, let's say that OpenAI thought
| it had the rights to process the NYT articles and even
| display them in part, for the same reasons, fair use or
| otherwise, that Google can process articles and display
| snippets of same in its News product, and/or for the same
| reasons that Google can process books and display
| excerpts in its Books product. Just like Google in those
| cases, I would not be surprised to find Google/OpenAI on
| the receiving end of a lawsuit from rights holders
| claiming violations of their copyright or IP rights.
| However, I side with Google then and OpenAI now, as I
| find both use cases to be fair use, as the LinkedIn case
| has shown that scraping is fair use. NYT is crying foul
| because users/consumers of its content archive have
| derived unforeseen value from said archive and under fair
| use terms, so NYT has no way to compel OpenAI to
| negotiate a licensing deal under which they could extract
| value from OpenAI's use of NYT data beyond the price paid
| by any other user of NYT content, whether it be unpaid
| fair use or fully paid use under license. It feels to me
| that NYT is engaging in both double-dipping and
| discriminatory pricing, because they can, and because
| they're big mad that OpenAI is more successful than they
| are with less access to the same or even less NYT data.
| visarga wrote:
| There is another fix, but it will have to wait for GPT-5.
| They could reword articles, summarize in different words
| and analyze their contents, creating sufficiently different
| variants. The ideas would be kept, but original expression
| stripped. Then train GPT5 on this data. The model can't
| possibly regurgitate copyrighted content if they never saw
| it during training.
|
| This can be further coupled with search - use GPT to look
| at multiple sources at once, and report. It's what humans
| do as well, we read the same news in different sources to
| get a more balanced take. Maybe they have contradictions,
| maybe they have inaccuracies, biases. We could keep that
| analysis for training models. This would also improve the
| training set.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I think NYT is going to win.
|
| LLMs are arguably compressed data archives with weird
| algorithms. The fact that they will regularly regurgitate
| verbatim quotes of training data is evidence of this, as are
| the guardrails that try to prevent this.
|
| The second piece of evidence is this paper explained here
| https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/why-gzip-just-beat-a-large-l...
| where instead of an LLM researchers used gzip compressed data
| as a model and it even beat trained LLMs.
|
| AI is a bit of a black box, but that doesn't protect the
| operators of black boxes from rights violation suits. You can't
| make a database of scraped copyrighted data and patented that
| querying that data is fair use.
|
| There needs to be law made here and the law just isn't going to
| be "everybody can copy everything for free as long as it's for
| model training".
|
| Licensing will have to be worked out, actual laws and not just
| case law needs to be written. I have a lot of sympathy for lots
| of leeway for the open source researchers and hackers doing
| things... but not so much for Microsoft and Microsoft sponsored
| openai.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Just learn to recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF_
|
| OpenAI has created a $100bn company on this transfer. The
| _Times_ may have an interest in a material fraction of that
| wealth.
| vidarh wrote:
| The NYT is also worth a tiny fraction of that. If it looks
| like they might get anywhere, it might be better for OpenAI
| to buy them
| afavour wrote:
| That would require NYT being willing to sell, which
| historically they have not been.
| vidarh wrote:
| I just looked up the share structure; didn't realise the
| publicly traded shares only appoints 1/3 of the board.
| Still their second best option is start buying up
| competitors and going ahead with purging NYT from their
| training set. That might well end up a worse option for
| NYT, as they won't stop LLMs from gradually intruding on
| their space and the moment OpenAI or other LLM providers
| own major publishers so they don't need to depend on
| scraping, they lose any leverage they currently have.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _might well end up a worse option for NYT, as they won
| 't stop LLMs from gradually intruding on their space_
|
| The _Times_ almost certainly wants its own LLM. I could
| see them striking a consortium agreement with other
| newspapers more easily than OpenAI.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| OMG! Or they could just license the content. I suspect that
| would be both easier and less expensive. ;-)
| vidarh wrote:
| I'm not convinced it's a given it will. If it becomes
| necessary to license, owning the large publishers will be
| leverage and allow locking competitors out unless you
| have a portfolio to cross license.
|
| OpenAI alone has a market cap that'd allow it to buy
| about as large a proportion of publishers of newspapers
| and books as they'd be allowed before competition
| watchdogs will start refusing consent.
|
| Put another way:
|
| If I was a VC with deep pockets investing in AI at this
| point, I'd hedge by starting to buy strategic stakes in
| media companies.
| dom96 wrote:
| If it looks like they might get anywhere, then lots of
| companies will also be able to get there, OpenAI can't buy
| all of them.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > Just learn to recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF.
|
| I'm not sure how your proposal would actually work. To
| recognize plagiarism during inference it needs to memorize
| harder.
|
| Kinda funny if it works though. We'd first train them to copy
| their training data verbatim _, then train them not to.
|
| _ That is how it works, right? They're trained to copy their
| training data verbatim because that's the loss function. It's
| just that they're given so much data that we don't expect this
| to be possible for most of the training data given the
| parameter count.
| empiko wrote:
| I wouldn't say it is an unexpected behavior. I remember
| reading papers about this memorization behavior few years ago
| (e.g., [1] is from 2019 and I believe it is not the first
| paper about this). It should be expected from OpenAI to know
| that LMs can exhibit memorizing behavior even after seeing
| the sample only once.
|
| [1] https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2019/08/13/memorization/
| furyofantares wrote:
| My expectation is that it can't memorize _most_ of its
| training data. I expect it to memorize some.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I don't think you could use RLHF to stop plagerism. RLHF can
| be used to teach what "angry response" is because you look at
| the text itself for qualities. A plagerized text doesn't have
| any special qualities aside from "existing already", which
| you can only determine by looking at the world.
|
| One thing you might do is use a full-text search database of
| the entire training data. If part of ChatGPT response is
| directly copied, give it the assignment of "please paraphrase
| this" and substitute the paraphrase into the response. This
| might slow ChatGPT down a lot - but it might not, I think an
| LLM is actually more computationally expensive than a full-
| text search by a lot.
| groceryheist wrote:
| I agree that this sketch comes closer to working in
| practice than simple RLHF. In my earlier comment I was
| imagining bringing in some auxiliary data like you describe
| to detect plagarism and then using RL to teach the model
| not to do it.
| intrasight wrote:
| Yeah, no - that proposal is no good. The correct solution is to
| have machine learning be more like human intelligence. You
| can't ask me to plagiarize a New York Times article. Not
| because of prompt rule violation but because I just can't. It's
| not how humans train (at least most).
| namlem wrote:
| You can't, but there are some people who can quickly memorize
| entire pages of written text.
| intrasight wrote:
| That's why I qualified with "at least most"
| kromem wrote:
| This isn't an issue with training, it's an issue with usage.
|
| Production open access LLMs _do_ probably need a front-end
| filter with a fine tuned RAG model that identifies and prevents
| spitting out copyrighted material. I fully support this.
|
| But we shouldn't be preventing the development of a technology
| that in 99.99% of usecases isn't doing that and can used for
| everything from diagnosing medical issues to letting coma
| patients communicate with an EEG to improving self-driving car
| algorithms because some random content producer's works were a
| drop in the ocean of content used to learn relationships
| between words and concepts.
|
| The edge cases where a model is rarely capable of reproducing
| training data don't reflect infringement of training but of
| use. If a writer learns to write well from a source is that
| infringement? Or is it when they then write exactly what was in
| the source that it becomes infringement?
|
| Additionally, now that we can use LLMs to read brain scans and
| have been moving towards biological computing, should we start
| to consider copying of material to the hippocampus a violation
| of the DMCA?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > The suit demonstrates instances where ChatGTP / Bing Copilot
| copy from the NYT verbatim. I think it is hard to argue that
| such copying constitutes "fair use". However, OAI/MS should be
| able to fix this within the current paradigm: Just learn to
| recognize and punish plagiarism via RLHF.
|
| Isn't that in tension with the basic idea of an LLM of
| predicting the next token? How do you achieve that while never
| getting close enough to plagiarism?
| bertil wrote:
| Adding an extra constraint of no copying verbatim from a very
| large and relevant corpus will be hard to guarantee without
| enormous databases of copyrighted content (which might not be
| legal to hold) and add an extra objective to a system with many
| often contradictory goals. I don't think that's the technology-
| sound solution or one in the interest of anyone involved. It's
| much more relevant to license content from as many newspapers
| as possible, recognize when references are relevant, and quote
| them either explicitly verbatim if that's the best answer or
| adapt (translate, simplify, add context) when appropriate.
|
| I feel like the NYTimes is asking for deletion as a negotiation
| tactic to force OpenAI to give them enough money to pay for
| their journalism (I am not sure who would subscribe to NYTimes
| if you can get as much through OpenAI, but I am open to
| registering extra to pay for their work).
| pants2 wrote:
| What if OpenAI were to first summarize or transform the
| content before training on it? Then the LLM has never
| actually seen copyrighted content and couldn't produce an
| exact copy.
| hn_acker wrote:
| > This is a strong claim that just downloading articles into
| training data is what violates the copyright. That GTP outputs
| verbatim copies is a red herring.
|
| It's the other way around. There is no infringement if the
| model output is not substantially similar to a work in the
| training set [1]:
|
| > To win a claim of copyright infringement in civil or criminal
| court, a plaintiff must show he or she owns a valid copyright,
| the defendant actually copied the work, and the level of
| copying amounts to misappropriation.
|
| The questions are, which parties should bear liability when the
| model creates infringing outputs, and how should that liability
| be split among the parties? Given that getting an infringing
| output likely requires the prompt to reference an existing work
| (which is what's happening in the article), an author of a
| work, an element in an existing work, or a characteristic/style
| strongly associated with certain works/authors, I believe that
| the user who makes the prompt should bear most of the liability
| should the user choose to publish an infringing output in a way
| that doesn't fall under fair use. (AI companies should not be
| publishing model outputs by default.)
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity#Substan...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The level of copying here is the copying _into the training
| set_ , not the copying _through use of the model_.
|
| Its true that OpenAI will defend the wholesale copying into
| the training set by arguing that the transformative purpose
| of the _next_ use reaches back and renders that copying fair
| use, but while that 's clearly the dominant position of the
| AI industry, and it definitely seems compatible with the
| Cobstitutional purpose of Fair Use (while currently
| statutory, the statutory provision is codification of
| Constitutional case law), it is a novel fair use argument.
| hn_acker wrote:
| > The level of copying here is the copying into the
| training set, not the copying through use of the model.
|
| NY Times is suing because of both the model outputs and the
| existence of the training set. But infringement in the
| training set doesn't necessarily mean that the model
| infringes. Why? Because of the substantial similarity
| requirement. But first, I'll address the training set.
|
| For articles that a person obtains through legal methods
| (like buying subscriptions) but doesn't then republish,
| storing copies of those articles is analogous to recording
| a legally accessed television show (time-shifting), which
| generally is fair use. Currently, no court has ruled that
| "analogous to time-shifting" is good enough for the time-
| shifting precedent to apply, but I think the difference is
| not significant. The same applies to companies. Companies
| are not literally people, but there isn't a reason for the
| time-shifting precedent to not apply to companies.
|
| What about the articles that OpenAI obtained through
| illegal methods? Then the very act of obtaining those
| articles would be illegal. The training set contains those
| copies, so NY Times can sue to make OpenAI delete those
| copies and pay damages. But it's not trivially obvious that
| a GPT model is a copy of any works or contains copied
| expression of the any works in the training set; the
| weights that make up the model represent millions of works,
| it's not trivially obvious that the model contains
| something substantially similar to the expression in a work
| in the training set. Therefore, it's not trivially obvious
| that infringement with respect to the training set amounts
| to infringement with respect to the model made from the
| training set. If OpenAI obtained NY Times articles through
| illegal means, then making OpenAI delete the training set
| would be reasonable, but the model is a separate matter.
|
| As long as the model doesn't contain copied expression and
| the _weights_ can 't be reversed into something
| substantially similar to expression in the existing works,
| then what matters is the output of the model.
|
| If a user gives a prompt which contains no reference to an
| existing NY Times author, work, or a strongly associated
| characteristic/style, then do OpenAI's models produce
| outputs substantially similar to expression in the existing
| works? If not, then OpenAI shouldn't be liable for
| infringing works, because the infringing works result from
| the user's prompts. If my premise is false, then my
| conclusion falls apart. But if my premise is true, then at
| most I would admit that OpenAI has a limited burden to
| prevent users from giving those prompts.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Any lawsuit makes all the claims it can and demands every sort
| of relief it might plausibly have. That's not to say that's how
| it should be (it can have awful results), just to say that's
| what to expect (and hope courts only considers the reasonable
| claim - "stop freely sharing our data" and avoids
| ridiculous/anti-fair-use claim "you can't even store our
| data").
|
| The thing about you claim, _" Just learn to recognize and
| punish plagiarism via RLHF"_ is that we've had an endless
| series of prompt exploits as well as unprompted leakage and
| these demonstrate that an LLM just doesn't have fixed border
| between its training data and its output. This will it
| basically impossible for OpenAI to say "we can logically
| guarantee ChatGPT won't serve your data freely to anyone".
| altals2023 wrote:
| Won't hold in court. GPT is a platform mainly providing answer to
| private individuals asking. Is like you ask a professor a
| question and he answered verbatim what copyrighted materials
| available (due to photographic memory) word for word back to you.
| Now if you take this answer and write a book or publish enmass on
| blogs for example, then you are the one should be sued by NYT. If
| GPT use the exact same wordings and publish it out to evetyone
| visiting their page, then that is on OpenAI.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| If said professor offered a service where anyone could ask them
| for information that is behind a paywall, and they provided it
| without significant transformation, this would certainly be
| copyright infringement that the copyright holder would have
| every right and motivation to take action against.
| gedy wrote:
| Professors are largely behind a paywall
| elashri wrote:
| I think the scale only matters here (probably). Because I
| will find it hard that a teacher/professor will not be
| allowed to setup a service where they will teach and provide
| their knowledge for others. That is basically the concept of
| teaching. Of course until LLM, we never had this scale
| before. Millions of potential learners vs the normal hundreds
| in a classroom session. So that makes the new case
| interesting
| toyg wrote:
| "Teaching" by copying source books word for word, would be
| copyright infringement; see, for example, the well-known
| issues around photocopying books or even excerpts.
|
| Also lying on source materials (e.g. telling students that
| some respected historian denies the Holocaust happened,
| when it's obviously not the case) is not "teaching" - it's
| defamation, and the NYT is absolutely right to pursue that
| angle too.
|
| Using LLMs as general-purpose search engines is a
| minefield, I would not be surprised if the practice
| disappeared in the next 20 years. Obviously the tech is
| here to stay, there is no problem when it's applied to
| augmenting niche work; but as a Google replacement, it has
| so many issues
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Teaching" by copying source books word for word, would
| be copyright infringement; see, for example, the well-
| known issues around photocopying books or even excerpts.
|
| Incorrect. Educational use helps satisfy one of tests for
| fair use. Teachers can, in many cases, photocopy
| copyrighted work without infringing on that copyright.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Educational use is just one of the many factors used to
| determine whether an instance of copyright infringement
| is fair use or not, but it is not carte blanche for
| educators to ignore IP laws just because they're
| educating.
| toyg wrote:
| Teachers can _in some very limited cases_ photocopy _very
| small chunks_ of copyrighted work. This also varies
| significantly from country to country; the starting
| position is that they _cannot_ reproduce works in their
| entirety.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Would parroting back article content perfectly from memory
| certainly be copyright infringement?
| verve_rat wrote:
| Go perform a song in a public place without a licencing
| arrangement and let us know.
| infinityio wrote:
| scale is important here - maybe a better analogy is
| setting up a paid Spotify clone with all the music
| sourced from torrents with some slight distortion effect
| added
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| My favorite example of performing a song in a public
| place without a licensing arrangement:
|
| https://youtu.be/j_UoACEUZqA
| __loam wrote:
| I hope people start calling out the "well it's fine if a human
| does it" arguments out for the rat fuck thinking it is. These
| are computational systems operating at very large scales run by
| some of the wealthiest companies in the world.
|
| If I go fishing, the regulations I have to comply with are very
| light because the effect I have on the environment is minimal.
| The regulations for an industrial fishing barge are rightfully
| very different, even if the end result is the same fish on your
| plate.
| Garrrrrr wrote:
| unfortunately that's not the crowd of people here. 80% of the
| comments under this thread (right now, 2:52est) are making
| similar arguments and *continue* to act like LLMs are doing
| something unique/creative... instead of just generating
| sentences, from algorithms, from virtually pirated content in
| the form of data mining
| kriro9jdjfif wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
| his salary depends on his not understanding it."
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-
| ge...
| __loam wrote:
| Gotta get that tender offer money somehow.
| c1b wrote:
| "As if LLMs are doing something creative and aren't just
| algorithms"
|
| You have no idea what you're talking about huh?
| visarga wrote:
| GPT is like a fleet of small fishing boats, each user driving
| their boat in another direction, not a fishing barge. For
| every token written by the model there must be a human who
| prompted, and then consumed it. It is manual, and personal,
| and deliberate.
|
| In fact all the demonstrations in the lawsuit PDF were
| intentionally angling for reproducing copyrighted content.
| They had to push the model to do it. That won't happen unless
| users deliberately ask for it. It won't happen en-masse.
| __loam wrote:
| Gpt is operated by one company. If a million people eat
| your fish, you're still a barge.
|
| Boo hoo they had to push it. That was never the problem
| with these bullshit nozzles. The issue is they put that
| stuff in the training set in the first place. If you can't
| be honest about that then I have no interest in debating
| this with you.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Professors and schools get into legal problems when professors
| pirate and/or otherwise distribute content they don't have
| licenses for.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| The professor having been trained in academia would state the
| sources of the verbatim quotes. In writing papers he would use
| references and explicit quotes. There's nothing hidden going on
| with the professor.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941
| kristianp wrote:
| True, the Verge article was posted here earlier.
| tarruda wrote:
| Would be funny if NT Times won this and all commercial LLMs were
| shut down.
|
| Then LLMs would be distributed only via torrents, like most
| copyright infringing media.
| __loam wrote:
| Making these things anathema to commercial interests and making
| training them at scale legally perilous would be a huge win.
| mdekkers wrote:
| > making training them at scale legally perilous would be a
| huge win.
|
| Why?
| fsckboy wrote:
| I have no idea what he's thinking, but if everybody in the
| community here had an LLM in their pocket and large orgs
| did not, it would at least be kind of fun.
| __loam wrote:
| The open source people can continue to pretend they matter
| in this field and large corporations like Microsoft will
| stop stealing everything that moves on the internet.
| anonymousab wrote:
| Because the megacorps should have to pay the people
| creating the works they are training their
| multibillion/eventual multitrillion dollar systems on, and
| should get a nice rake to the face when they try to do an
| end run around it.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| A huge win for countries with lax copyright laws. These
| things aren't going away, the worst case scenario would be
| exactly that scenario playing out - then China (or some other
| peer to the US's tech sector) just continues developing them
| to achieve an economic advantage. All in addition to the
| obvious political implications of AI chatbots being
| controlled by them.
|
| The LLM genie is out of the bottle: an unfavorable court
| ruling in a single country isn't going to stuff it back in.
| geysersam wrote:
| Do LLM really give an economic advantage though? I've
| mostly seen them used to write quirky poems and bad code.
| People are scrambling to find use-cases but it's not very
| convincing so far.
|
| On the other hand, if LLM are used to "launder" copyright
| content and, accepting the premises of copyright law, this
| has the effect of reducing incentives to do creative work,
| that has obvious negative implications for economic
| productivity.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| > I've mostly seen them used to write quirky poems and
| bad code.
|
| Assuming this is in good faith: the ability to write
| code, documentation, and tests is absolutely a
| productivity enhancer to an existing programmer. The code
| snippets from a dedicated tool like copilot are of very
| usable quality if you're using a popular language like
| Python or JS.
| __loam wrote:
| I don't give a shit about what China does.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >making training them at scale legally perilous
|
| Loading data to which you have no rights over into your
| software is legally perilous, yes.
|
| It's as easy as simply asking for and receiving permission
| from the data's rightsholders (which might require exchange
| of coin) to make it not legally perilous.
| __loam wrote:
| Sounds expensive.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| If you want to do things with other people's stuff, yes
| it can get expensive.
| realusername wrote:
| They would still thrive but in other countries with other legal
| frameworks. The concept is way too valuable to disappear.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| If its economically relevant us will use its iron fist to
| have its laws adopted the world over, like most things such
| as copyright or drugs
| realusername wrote:
| They could but that would pretty much mean giving up the
| tech supremacy to China since they won't apply it. China
| already doesn't care much about copyright so that's not
| going to stop them.
|
| I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to convince the EU
| though, the EU has an history of giving up rights and
| markets to big copyright holders even if that hurts the
| local companies.
| sgt101 wrote:
| What will happen in this case is that large content providers
| will get paid directly and smaller content providers will get
| rolled up into a licensing bag and get small indirect payouts.
| For example, we might see a model where people who's books have
| been used will get a pay out proportionate to the sales of the
| book (perhaps), so if your books sells just a few thousand
| copies expect $20 but if you sell millions expect $20k
|
| LLM's will become more expensive and less attractive as money
| printers, this will screw with the business models of the
| direct provision folks like OpenAI, MS and Google, MS and
| Google will only shed tears for money spent while OpenAI will
| just not have as good an income stream until they think of
| something new.
| davedx wrote:
| > large content providers will get paid directly
|
| I'm sure that's what _they_ want, but I 'm not sure that's
| what the outcome will be. What if they want to charge a
| prohibitive amount of money for their content?
| sgt101 wrote:
| Dunno - but my guess is that the price will be what the
| market will bear...
|
| I think Spotify vs Napster is a good example, content
| creators in news (the Journalists) are already in a hard
| place (vs. successful rock stars preinternet) I think that
| the news providers are rather like the music lables.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| The lawsuit itself (which arstechnica links to):
|
| https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...
|
| From page 30 and onwards has some fairly clear examples on how
| ChatGPT has an (internal) copy of copyrighted material which it
| will recite verbatim.
|
| Essentially if you copy a lot of copyrighted material into a blob
| and then apply some sort of destructive compression to it. How
| destructive would that compression have to be for the copyright
| no longer to hold? My guess it would have to be a lot.
|
| As I see it the closeness of OpenAI may be what saves it. OpenAI
| could filter and block copyrighted material from the LLM from
| leaving the web interface using some straight forward matching
| mechanism against the copyrighted part of the data set ChatGPT
| has been trained on. Whereas open source projects trained on the
| same data set would be left with the much harder task of removing
| the copyrighted material from the LLM itself.
| jprete wrote:
| The answer to the "closedness" is externally controlled audits.
| vanchor3 wrote:
| > Essentially if you copy a lot of copyrighted material into a
| blob and then apply some sort of destructive compression to it.
| How destructive would that compression have to be for the
| copyright no longer to hold? My guess it would have to be a
| lot.
|
| I imagine the goal is closer to "enough that no one notices we
| stole it", either in a way that it's not easily discoverable or
| even when directly analyzed there's enough plausible
| deniability to scrape by.
| Jackson__ wrote:
| I wonder how they got these results, seeing as they are not
| showing any of the usual UI's (i.e. ChatGPT/Copilot).
|
| It makes it difficult for me to ascertain whether it is
| repeating from it's training data, or they committed the same
| mistake as the OP article of using Copilot, which ends up
| googling(binging?) the article first, before replying.
| rimeice wrote:
| This wave is growing. Just cannot see how the big LLM players are
| going to get round this without paying big licence fees to
| content creators. Feels a bit like the torrent to Spotify moment,
| but for _all_ content, not just music. How they will manage the
| licensing model is beyond me, it's going to be very easy for
| someone to sue these companies, but very difficult for the
| companies to calculate, attribute value and payout individual
| creators that contributed a tiny fraction of the training data.
| Surely this will make it very difficult for them to keep a
| business model working to a level their VC backers need to
| warrant even a fraction of their valuations.
| visarga wrote:
| Wondering who tf reads old NYT articles? News become old really
| fast. chatGPT is months or years behind.
| fsckboy wrote:
| in my head I like to think of web crawler search engines/search
| engine databases and LLMs as being somewhat similar. Search
| engines are ok if they just provide snippets with citations
| (urls), and they would be unacceptable if they provided large
| block quotes that removed the need to go to the original source
| to read the original expression of more complex ideas.
|
| A web-crawled LLM that lived within the same constraints would be
| a search engine under another name, with a slightly different
| presentation style. If it starts spitting out entire articles
| without citation, that's not acceptable.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I think it's different. LLMs can solve problems. Part of that
| problem-solving ability comes from training completely
| unrelated content such as NYT articles. GPT4 doesn't have to
| spit out NYT articles verbatim to have benefited from NYT
| articles. It uses NYT articles for every query.
| fsckboy wrote:
| Let's say I'm an academic; if my research, note-taking, and
| paper writing skills lead to fair-use, cited quotations where
| applicable, general knowledge not identified, and the
| creative aspects and unique conclusions creating the
| intriguing part of my work, that's copacetic. If I spit out
| (from memory, mind you) verbatim quotes and light rewordings
| of NY Times articles, that's not; "I don't remember where I
| got that material" doesn't cut it. My reading the NY Times
| every day for years because I judge it to be more literate
| and accurate than other sources, undoubtedly it has informed
| my thinking and style, but I don't need to acknowledge that.
|
| If I use ChatGPT as a research tool, as long as it lives
| within the same parameters that I have to live within, I
| don't see a problem with its education/learning.
|
| I understand that the NYTimes would like a slice of anything
| that comes out of the GPT but I'm talking about what seems
| reasonable. People who share their copyrighted material do
| not own all of the thinking that comes out of it; they own
| that expression of it, that is all.
|
| Will AI destroy the economics of "writing" the way the web
| has killed newspapers? perhaps, perhaps we'll all benefit
| from and need a new model, but killing the new to keep the
| old on life support is not the way.
| aurareturn wrote:
| You're not replicating yourself millions of times and
| selling yourself for $20/month. If you are, then NYT might
| sue you too.
|
| I'm not saying LLMs are by default, illegal. All I'm saying
| is that there is some merit to why NYT and content
| companies want a piece of the pie and think they deserve
| it.
| fsckboy wrote:
| The NY Times benefited in the past from technologies that
| led to widespread distribution of the Times, putting
| competitors out of business and concentrating talent at
| the Times. Nobody is stopping them from producing new
| editions of the newspaper, their core business. People
| now have technologies that help them "remember" what was
| salient in back issues of the Times. Such is progress.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| If you forget about the LLM aspect, and simply build a product
| out of (legally) scraped NYT articles, is that fair use?
|
| 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...
| logicchains wrote:
| > 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.
|
| >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.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| That's not the example. Here I proactively scrape NYT,
| summarise articles for a fee and sell that as a service. It's
| not people coming to me with some articles to summarise, and
| maybe then publishing it online.
|
| 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.
| logicchains wrote:
| >That's not the example. Here I proactively scrape NYT,
| summarise articles for a fee and sell that as a service.
| It's not people coming to me with some articles to
| summarise, and maybe then publishing it online.
|
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _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.
| 8note wrote:
| How far is this from what reddit does?
|
| I read a NYT article, then summarize it into a link title
| for reddit. Reddit then republishes the summary to all of
| its users.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That's not true at all. If you pay someone to copy NYT
| articles for you verbatim, and then they give the copies to
| you, and then you publish them online, then you've _both_
| violated the copyright. You are never allowed to make copies
| of copyrighted works, even for private deals (making such
| copies for purely personal use, such as archival, falls under
| fair use - but you can 't build a service out of that).
|
| 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.
| logicchains wrote:
| >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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The article states that they used it initially through
| ChatGPT, but that seems to have been fixed in the
| meantime, at least for the very simplistic queries that
| used to work ("the first paragraph of the Carl Zimmer
| article on old DNA" in ChatGPT used to return the exact
| data from NYT, and "next paragraph" could then be used to
| get the following ones). Even if this has been fixed, it
| still proves that ChatGPT encodes exact copies of NYT
| articles in its weights, which may be a violation in
| itself, even if it is prevented from returning them
| directly. Especially if they ever started distributing
| the trained model.
|
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If it had exact copies they would have showed it could
| recall the 8th paragraph or something. Even google and
| the nyt release the first paragraph for free.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Also, ChatGPT isn't a person with rights and duties. The
| people that made it are responsible for it.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Another factor to consider is that neural nets can function as
| lossy compression, which becomes extremely evident when using
| models that are overfit.
|
| Sometimes they're so overfit that the compression isn't even
| lossy, and the data is encoded verbatim in the NN.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yes, but this then hits against learning/understanding and
| compression being _fundamentally the same thing_. I can 't
| think of a better way to argue in favor of "it's fine if
| human does it, therefore it's fine if LLM does it", than from
| the "lossy compression" angle.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| We can have different rules for humans than for machines.
| In fact, that happens all the time.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's not okay for a human to pirate, plagiarize, violate IP
| rights and laws, etc.
|
| 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.
| sgt101 wrote:
| also if I write and article and quote some "text like
| this" [1] then that's not plagerism, but if my arguement
| is that 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". Well,
| that's plagiarism and it's not allowed and people will
| get peeved and my career might get damaged.
|
| I await the HN ban with fear..
|
| [1] I'm not even doing referencing - so I am surely an
| LLM.
| pas wrote:
| sure, but if I use an LLM to write a novel/article, I can
| be sued in civil court not the LLM.
|
| but, more importantly, OpenAI can also be sued for
| tortious interference? (basically the civil equivalent of
| accessory)
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Whoever operates the LLM, in this case OpenAI, engaged in
| copyright infringement through the unauthorized
| modification, reproduction and distribution of content to
| you.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| The person doing the requesting did.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| That's not how interactive computer services work.
| ben_w wrote:
| > sure, but if I use an LLM to write a novel/article, I
| can be sued in civil court not the LLM
|
| 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.
| darkerside wrote:
| Wouldn't you find out by suing the dolphin and seeing if
| it holds up in court?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Not if you were smart, unless you have some sort of solid
| argument for why the established case law about this sort
| of thing is faulty.
| vanviegen wrote:
| > Gradient descent and backpropagation don't take place
| in the brain.
|
| 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.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > 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...
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Sadly, I have seen one. It was a vba script from the late
| 90s that used a simple dense multilayer network to do
| some unsupervised pattern classification. The linear
| algebra tools in vba/excel along with the solvers are all
| native dll code and the vba itself is all AOT compiled to
| native, so it typically runs very fast, and for small
| matrices it beats out numpy by an order of magnitude due
| to the ffi overhead. Was it the wrong tool? It depends on
| your constraints, but probably. It did work though.
| ben_w wrote:
| > 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".
|
| 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.
| danans wrote:
| > We need to figure out what the deeper rules are that
| lead to the status quo, not merely mimic the superficial
| result.
|
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| > machines covered in lab grown tissue
|
| 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?
| riversflow wrote:
| I recon bio-printing is now where home computing was in
| the Apple 1 era
|
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| "It's not okay for a human to pirate, plagiarize, violate
| IP rights and laws, etc."
|
| most of the world disagrees with this view, and that
| means they will create the AI that wins.
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| It's fine for a human to remember it. It's not fine for a
| human redistribute it for money (legally speaking). That's
| copyright infringement.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Correct, just like it's infringement to reproduce an
| article from memory using pen and paper intentionally.
| The person deciding to do that bears responsibility.
| OpenAI would be liable IFF they were intentionally
| facilitating that, instead of it being an undesired
| artifact from overfitting.
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure if you reproduce a work from memory by
| accident, because you didn't notice your subconscious had
| just stored the entire article and is now reproducing it
| word for word, you'd still be guilty of copyright
| infringement.
| yencabulator wrote:
| The music business is full of examples of that.
| freejazz wrote:
| It's super obnoxious when people who have no
| understanding of the law, point to industry patterns or
| behaviors as examples of what is legal, not knowing the
| law and not knowing whether or not the thing they are
| pointing to is legal. The music business is also full of
| copyright infringement litigation. You also are not
| taking into account whether what is copied by an artist
| is covered by copyright when you made your statement. Do
| you know what's covered in music copyrights, such that
| your statement ever had any value for anyone else here?
| freejazz wrote:
| That's not true at all. Copyright infringement is a
| strict liability offense with no inquiry in to the state
| of the mind of the infringer from a liability
| perspective. The state of mind of the infringer is only
| relevant to the issue of willful infringement.
| anticensor wrote:
| Willful vs less-than-willful infringement are definitely
| two separate types of offences, as indicated by the
| difference of penalty.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| Is there some LLM meta where understanding and compression
| are argued to be the same thing I'm not aware of?
|
| 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.
| adroniser wrote:
| Suppose you wanted to train an LLM to do addition.
|
| 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/r
| obertskmiles/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.
| docfort wrote:
| It's exactly this kind of thinking that underlies
| lossless text compression (not exactly what a transformer
| guarantees but often what happens). For that reason, some
| people thought it would be fun to combine zip and
| transformers. https://openreview.net/forum?id=hO0c2tG2xL
| vidarh wrote:
| Even something as simple as LZW starts developing a
| dictionary. Not all compression is sufficient for
| understanding, but the more you compress a stream of
| data, the more dependent you are on understanding the
| source, because understanding the source allows you to
| take more shortcuts and still be able to reconstruct the
| data.
| amoss wrote:
| The idea precedes LLMs by a couple of decades and is
| thought to apply more broadly within ML/AI than being a
| specific meta for LLMs. http://prize.hutter1.net/ has
| been around for a while, there is a link in there to the
| earlier work (called AIXI?).
| dns_snek wrote:
| > fundamentally the same thing
|
| I fundamentally disagree. That's not some established fact,
| just a narrative used by those who wish to plagiarize using
| "AI".
| devsda wrote:
| Humans are defined not just by their abilities but by their
| limitations too. We celebrate our achievements because
| sometimes they surpass the limitations of an average human.
|
| 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.
| anileated wrote:
| I can't think of a better way to argue in favor of "LLMs
| are copyright laundering machines" than from the humanness
| angle.
|
| 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.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Humans don't exactly have the greatest track record of
| granting other humans rights. I don't presume they'll get
| it any better with AI.
|
| 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.
| accrual wrote:
| > Sometimes they're so overfit that the compression isn't
| even lossy, and the data is encoded verbatim in the NN.
|
| Here's an article from November 2023 that discusses this:
|
| https://not-just-memorization.github.io/extracting-
| training-...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Typically I can 't take a personal "tier" of a product and
| charge 3rd parties for derivatives of it. Say like VS Code._
|
| 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.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| As I say, I don't really know. But then, this is exactly how
| SaaS licensing works. There may even be a free personal tier,
| where you can't sell products based on it, and a professional
| tier which may be very expensive indeed.
|
| 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.
| px43 wrote:
| From what I can tell, this has nothing to do with LLMs at all.
| In the example in the article, the user is asking Bing to go
| fetch the contents of an article directly from the website, and
| print it out, which it dutifully does.
|
| 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.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I suppose that's a relatively easy thing to fix, technically.
| It proves, however, that th underlying LLM is trained on
| copyrighted data.
|
| I'm not sure the problem goes away simply if the LLM in
| question (or any other one) gets some "no verbose
| regurgitation" filter.
| exitb wrote:
| In that case, the language model calls a search function
| and just repeats the result out its conversation context,
| not its training data. With that in mind it's not clear why
| it's ok for Bing itself to quote the source, but it stops
| being ok, when a chatbot does it.
| Jensson wrote:
| Bing links to the source, chatbots doesn't.
| px43 wrote:
| In the example from the article, it very clearly points
| to all the sources used.
| dyno12345 wrote:
| bing's chatbot does
| kolinko wrote:
| The example from the article doesn't show that LLM is
| trained on copyrighted data - it's just Bing fetching the
| source article, providing it to GPT, and GPT rephrasing the
| article. An agent trained on entirely copyright-free data
| would provide exactly the same output.
| sagarm wrote:
| Isn't it totally normal to write articles / blog posts that
| effectively summarize, and often quote from, news articles?
| laborcontract wrote:
| My impression is that it's not necessarily legal, but going
| after bloggers and proving damages based is just a huge waste
| of their time. OpenAI came by with their fat stack of funding
| and changed that.
| facu17y wrote:
| It is legal. Fair use. People have been doing it for ages.
| Almost every article you've ever read has some fair use of
| another article, book or news item, etc.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| When it becomes a service where you make money but the
| source doesn't is it still fair use?
| whythre wrote:
| Yeah. No one is out there suing the shit out of cliff
| notes because they published a summary of Catcher in the
| Rye.
| tkz1312 wrote:
| they might if cliff notes starting copy pasting parts of
| the source into their articles and passing it off as
| original writing though :)
| throwuwu wrote:
| The Tolkien estate should get busy suing all the fantasy
| writers, comic artists, game developers and board and
| card game companies. Lots of cash there.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| They have done some of that actually. Tolkien will be
| public domain in the nations that are at aithors death+50
| in a few days. Sadly, it will be a much longer wait in
| mine and many others.
| hn_acker wrote:
| Newspapers generally don't "pass off" quotes as their own
| writing. They make clear which parts they quoted.
| ralfd wrote:
| What parent poster meant is that it is normal that news
| organisations reference each other and report/cite/rephrase
| each other reports. For example all other news papers
| reported about the Watergate scandal reported by
| Bernstein&Woodward in the Washington Post.
| Jensson wrote:
| Those cite the original source that they used to write
| the article, the gpt models don't.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Depends on your prompt
| laborcontract wrote:
| Yeah but for every instance of that are face hugger links
| blogs that will rewrite the article and almost meant to
| deprive the source of any credit.
|
| It's not clear to me where the line is.
| Symmetry wrote:
| No, in US law at least there can be no copyright of facts,
| only presentation. If you convey the same facts in
| different words that isn't a matter of fair use, it's never
| even a matter of copyright in the first place.
| onos wrote:
| How about things that aren't quite facts? Reviews,
| opinions, etc.
| ralusek wrote:
| Illegal to have the same opinion as someone?
| onos wrote:
| I was inarticulate. Imagine a business that goes to some
| trouble to review businesses or products. Can we lift
| those and serve them ourselves? Non facts...
| oxguy3 wrote:
| No, it is very specifically and deliberately fair use. That
| is the primary intended purpose of fair use. The New York
| Times doesn't own the news; they just own their articles.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I think the issue is that they trained ChatGPT on the New
| York Times' proprietary IP without paying licensing fees and,
| the Times argues, that is illegal. By way of proof the Times
| has examples of ChatGPT dumping out articles verbatim.
| joegahona wrote:
| This is exactly how I understand it. There's a lot ink
| getting spilled about "summarizing isn't illegal" and "what
| about Cliffs Notes" but that isn't what this is about.
|
| 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.
| sagarm wrote:
| IMO it's pretty hard to training an LLM isn't a
| transformative use. It's clearly not just copying, or even
| excerpting. Even if it was just compression (and it's not),
| they're only providing model output not distributing the
| "compressed" NYT articles.
|
| Yielding verbatim snippets of copyrighted content is a
| problem for OpenAI though.
| jojobas wrote:
| Can you read all of NYT and other things, and answer others'
| questions based on your knowledge? I'd imagine you can. I'm
| afraid you can't sidestep the question whether an LLM is more
| like a person who's read a lot or an archive/index.
| papruapap wrote:
| Using similar logic NYT should pay all actors involved in their
| articles.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with scraping openly available data
| (including data openly available by mistake, as long as you are
| not aware of it, see the Bluetouff affair).
|
| So the demand to destroy those databases seems very dubious to
| me.
|
| Of course later violating fair use is another issue.
| oefrha wrote:
| The real answer is it totally depends on whether your product
| grows to $10,000,000,000, and whether you pays part of it back.
| Search engines pay with referral traffic.
| tauntz wrote:
| > Is that fair use?
|
| 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Also "fair use" does not use/define precedent - each case is
| assessed individually which really can be a flip of the coin.
| hn_acker wrote:
| Fair use is specific to the US, as far as I'm aware.
| Moreover, Congress had to codify fair use (turn fair use
| common into statutory law in the form of 17 U.S. Code SS 107)
| in order to make copyright statutes compatible with the First
| Amendment. 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.
| anticensor wrote:
| > Most other countries don't have freedom of expression and
| freedom of the press
|
| This is demonstrably wrong. Many countries have both
| freedoms, albeit some have less strong protection than
| others.
| qeternity wrote:
| > Typically I can't take a personal "tier" of a product and
| charge 3rd parties for derivatives of it.
|
| 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.
| ks2048 wrote:
| It would be nice to have a nice principled answer to this, but
| unfortunately, in our world, the answer is probably: if you
| start making LOTS of money doing this, they will come after
| you.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The best example is that sport scores, names and stats are
| not copyrightable by settled case law; however, you still
| have to go to the NBA and players union if you want to make a
| fantasy basketball game that has stats or names.
| bnralt wrote:
| As someone pointed out, plenty of blogs made money off of doing
| just that. Many people go to Reddit to read news article
| summaries (and often a comment just pastes the whole article
| verbatim), instead of paying a site like the New York Times.
| Twitter and other social media sites are full of people
| summarizing articles from the New York Times. Any late breaking
| news article from Wikipedia is going to be mostly summarizing
| information from reporters.
|
| 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.
| superb-owl wrote:
| > A sibling comment mentions search engines. I think there's a
| big difference. A search engine doesn't replace the source, not
| at all.
|
| 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).
| paxys wrote:
| Google is very careful to license all the content that shows
| up in that interface. They even pay Wikipedia, despite
| legally not needing to at all.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| While paying for CC content is not 100% anathema, it'd be
| pretty weird if that was what they were doing.
|
| Instead, I think they're paying for this:
|
| https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/
| carlosdp wrote:
| What you described is entirely fair use, actually.
|
| 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)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > What you described is entirely fair use, actually
|
| 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/
| NegativeK wrote:
| > suddenly everyone's a copyright lawyer
|
| 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.
| Teever wrote:
| One of my biggest gripes is a somewhat adjacent issue
| where everyone thinks they're an American copyright
| lawyer and that American copyright law is universal.
|
| 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.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| > that they understand it without being a lawyer.
|
| 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.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| Legality aside I think copyright of digital things in the
| digital age is a net negative to humanity.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Completely agree. Copyright should be abolished. All
| intellectual work is information, information is just
| bits and bits are just numbers. It's quite simply
| delusional to believe you can _own numbers_ in the 21st
| century, the age of information and ubiquitous globally
| networked pocket supercomputers.
|
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| This goes too far. Digital media are not only long series
| of numbers. They are often difficult-to-create
| expressions in image, video, and even interactive forms;
| regardless of their serialization format.
|
| 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.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > if a work is purely derivative of a source work
|
| CliffNotes, Wikipedia, etc. have huge quantities of
| summarized copyrighted work.
| caesil wrote:
| Summarization generally isn't considered a derivative
| work.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
| btilly wrote:
| First, you missed the "and". Do CliffNotes, Wikipedia,
| etc. substantially impact the market for the original
| work? For example CliffNotes does not - people who buy
| the CliffNotes version typically already have the
| original work as well (for example from coursework). And
| Wikipedia may well do more to interest people in the
| original work than to replace it.
|
| 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.)
| joegahona wrote:
| > people who buy the CliffNotes version typically already
| have the original work as well (for example from
| coursework)
|
| 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.
| btilly wrote:
| I'm sure that somewhere, someone, has data confirming or
| denying this.
|
| But, anecdotally, it's what I've seen to be the case.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > Do CliffNotes, Wikipedia, etc. substantially impact the
| market for the original work?
|
| Yes.
|
| For example, Wikipedia cites many research journals that
| otherwise are available only by subscription.
|
| Prior to Wikipedia, gated information centers were the
| norm.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > You're the one presenting unfounded claims with
| confidence here.
|
| 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.
| btilly wrote:
| The "unfounded claims" were backed up by a link to
| Stanford on fair use and copyright. That's the opposite
| of being unfounded.
|
| 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.
| caesil wrote:
| >if a work is purely derivative of a source work
|
| 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.
| avidiax wrote:
| A question is whether the new model still intrinsically
| embeds the source text, but this is later filtered in the
| output, or if it no longer embeds the text at all.
|
| The latter is more defensible.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I personally appreciate the semi truck sized loophole that
| is satire. One can include an entire copy written work
| within one's own work as long as the treatment of that
| other copy written work is parody / satire. This is a
| provision of US copyright law put in place to protect
| political satire, which can be anything, because politics
| is everything.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I would say it is arguable that is fair use, but the whole
| thing about fair use is that it is a defense, not a type of
| license or something you can preemptively apply. So whether
| or not it will be protected under fair use is actually not
| determined yet. In fact I would say that's the entire debate
| here, right?
|
| 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.
| h1fra wrote:
| it's fair use if you don't make money from your project no?
| JohnFen wrote:
| No.
|
| In the US, whether or not you make money has little to do
| with whether or not your use qualifies as "fair use".
| semiquaver wrote:
| Why do you say that? Commercial vs noncommercial use is a
| primary factor in the "purpose" prong of the fair use
| balancing test and a significant one in the "market
| effects" prong.
|
| 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.
| freejazz wrote:
| Because anyone that is familiar with fair use knows that
| the purpose prong and the commerciality aspect of it is
| not one of the more important prongs of the fair use
| analysis, whereas transformation is. Transformation
| adjusts what is a purpose that falls under fair use. Did
| you read Warhol??
| semiquaver wrote:
| Yes. Warhol is an example where the commercial nature of
| the secondary use was the deciding factor in its failure
| to pass the purpose prong. > 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.
|
| (P4). It's very likely that a noncommercial secondary use
| would have passed under the reasoning in Warhol. I don't
| understand the point you're trying to make.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Whether or not the use is commercial is certainly one of
| the considerations, but it's not the most significant one
| generally. There certainly can be specific cases where
| it's very significant, of course.
|
| 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".
| semiquaver wrote:
| Agreed.
| thephyber wrote:
| Your parent is more right than you.
|
| 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.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Weird Al makes a point of getting permission even though
| he views his satirical works as 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.
| LogicalRisk wrote:
| He doesn't actually make very heavy use of the satire
| plank of fair use. He credits the original artists. From
| his own website
|
| "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.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Weird Al is actually using compulsory
| licensing in music and just paying the required royalties
| to the songwriters. Anyone can cover any published song,
| you just have to pay the royalties when you do.
| thephyber wrote:
| No.
|
| 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.
| cma wrote:
| Cover songs do get a compulsory license though, for a
| predetermined royalty, and one condition is not changing
| it too much.
| freejazz wrote:
| >What you described is entirely fair use, actually.
|
| Based upon what? You think other publishers use NYTimes
| articles for free without license?
| ummonk wrote:
| He's talking about citing and quoting NYTimes articles, not
| republishing them verbatim. That said, it's very different
| if you're a publication that sometimes cites reporting from
| other publications vs. a website exclusively dedicated to
| indexing and summarizing NYTimes articles.
| Powdering7082 wrote:
| Do you have some examples & are you sure they don't pay
| licensing fees to NYT?
| _the_inflator wrote:
| A lawyer starts a conclusion like this:
|
| "It could be fair use if conditions a, b, and c are met.
| Condition a means..." ;)
| object-a wrote:
| Sourcing, quoting, and linking is covered in the NYTimes
| content policy under fair use. See:
| https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/115014891408-Obta...
|
| 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...
| brookst wrote:
| How about if you read the paper every day and write opinion
| pieces about world events? Fair use?
| modeless wrote:
| > To keep things simple, let's say I never regurgitate chunks
| of verbatim NYT articles, maybe quite short snippets.
|
| 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.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _However, it is well established that what Google does is
| perfectly legal._
|
| 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.
| modeless wrote:
| I am clearly talking about the web search engine in the
| context of copyright. Other products or legal concerns like
| antitrust are completely irrelevant here.
| graeme wrote:
| Any publisher can opt out of google. Publisher also have
| substantial control over titles and snippets shown in google,
| whether an article appears in google news, etc
|
| Paraphrasing is also known as cloning and is often a
| copyright violation
| modeless wrote:
| Copyright law doesn't mention opt outs or search engine
| snippet controls. It's not clear to me that robots.txt is
| the singular thing that makes Google legal.
|
| 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.
| freejazz wrote:
| >Copyright law doesn't mention opt outs or search engine
| snippet controls. It's not clear to me that robots.txt is
| the singular thing that makes Google legal.
|
| 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.
| modeless wrote:
| > you just assume everything google does is legal
|
| 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.
| LargeTomato wrote:
| If I make a website that scrapes NYT and passes it back
| and forth through a machine translator, say, English ->
| Spanish -> English, then the content will be slightly
| modified. Is this legal to make money off of?
|
| Seems like the legal answer is unclear but, like Napster,
| such a system seems like it would lose in court.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| It would be unlikely to be something you'd find paying
| customers for, though? I suppose if you charged a small
| percentage of what NYT charges people might be willing to
| consider it, but you'd have some costs for hosting etc.,
| so I am skeptical about its viability as a business
| model...
| graeme wrote:
| That's not the only reason. Google search is also
| transformative and non competitive with the underlying
| publications. And that is why the opt out is important.
| If you feel google competes with your site you don't have
| to sue Google: just tell them to to away
| modeless wrote:
| Transformative yes, so is ChatGPT. Much more so actually.
| Non-competitive is debatable. Especially with the instant
| answers Google has in addition to regular snippets which
| can also obviate the need to visit a site. I have a hard
| time seeing ChatGPT as competing with newspapers more
| than Google Search does.
|
| 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.
| caconym_ wrote:
| You took that quote out of context and missed the broader
| point in the process. The snippets provided in regular search
| results cannot generally replace the substance of the full
| articles they link to, while that's the whole _point_ of GP
| 's hypothetical website--it simply doesn't reproduce large
| chunks of text verbatim, presumably to avoid copyright
| infringement claims in the hypothetical's frame, and in GP's
| rhetorical frame to present an analogy with the information-
| laundering powers of LLMs that their creators claim make
| their exploitation of unlicensed training data fair use.
|
| 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.
|
| ---
|
| 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.
| 8note wrote:
| A search engine takes an input string, a corpus of text,
| and returns a series of text that best comes next after the
| input string.
|
| 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"
| caconym_ wrote:
| An 18 wheeler travels on wheels. A shopping cart travels
| on wheels. A shopping cart does not require a license to
| operate, therefore an 18 wheeler does not require a
| license to operate. A shopping cart can be operated
| inside a grocery store, therefore an 18 wheeler can be
| operated inside a grocery store. A child can operate a
| shopping cart, therefore a child can operate an 18
| wheeler.
|
| 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".
| riskable wrote:
| The reason why Google keeping entire digital copies of other
| people's copyrighted works is legal is because copyright is
| all about _distribution_ rights. Any person can possess the
| entire works of Disney (without paying for them), for example
| and as long as they do not _distribute_ those works they 're
| 100% in the clear.
|
| 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I agree with your IANAL take, but what about a situation with
| an extra level of indirection? So the service never reads
| actual NYT articles, but only reads blog/forum posts about NYT
| articles, and derives what is in the article from conversations
| about the article by people who have read it. Is that legal
| now?
| JCharante wrote:
| But is it legal for me to read the NY Times about a war, and
| then charge people to interview me as an "expert"?
| charcircuit wrote:
| This analogy fails to capture the transformative nature of
| these models. Hosting a derivative work that is also a news
| article is not transformative. Hosting a next word completer is
| very different than a news article and can't be used as a
| substitute.
| amelius wrote:
| > If you forget about the LLM aspect, and simply build a
| product out of (legally) scraped NYT articles, is that fair
| use?
|
| 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.
| oivey wrote:
| It is a good question with a simple answer: no.
| amelius wrote:
| It depends. Google built a product out of scraping content
| (Google Search).
|
| 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".
| rafabulsing wrote:
| It can allow you to deduce something, depending on the
| answer.
|
| 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.
| oivey wrote:
| The problem is multi-dimensional, so bounding logic like
| this isn't necessarily useful.
| rafabulsing wrote:
| I think it can still provide value if the actual scenario
| at hand is so complex and fraught that conversations
| about it end up mostly fruitless (as I think is the case
| here). At least it can provide you with some mental
| handholds and supports for where to start reasoning about
| the problem, which hopefully helps in finding some small
| agreements, or at the very least, mutual understanding of
| each other's positions.
| oivey wrote:
| The general answer is no. Fair use is a special carve out
| legally that has to be determined individually. If your
| product is something that regurgitates NYT articles while
| stripping NYT of their source of revenue, that's got fair
| odds to not qualify as fair use.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > Something like, summarize all articles on US-UK relationships
| over past 5 years.
|
| So like....Wikipedia, CliffNotes, encyclopedias, etc?
|
| None of these pay royalties to original.
| canttosme wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn :
|
| > 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._
| object-a wrote:
| IANAL but aren't the key terms there "selectively banning"
| and "publicly available"?
|
| 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"
| logicchains wrote:
| NYT's perspective is going to look so stupid in future when we
| put LLMs into mechanical bodies with the ability to interact with
| the physical world, and to learn/update their weights live. It
| would make it completely illegal for such a robot to
| read/watch/listen to any copyrighted material; no watching TV, no
| reading library books, no browsing the internet, because in doing
| so it could memorise some copyrighted content.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Will it? If the LLM in the body is allowed to read nytimes on a
| tablet I'm sure they wouldn't care.
| logicchains wrote:
| >If the LLM in the body is allowed to read nytimes on a
| tablet I'm sure they wouldn't care.
|
| Why should the law treat a LLM in a body reading NYT on a
| tablet differently than a LLM browsing the content from a
| website online and reading that?
| type_Ben_struct wrote:
| I disagree. The verbatim part is the problem. You're drawing a
| comparison to how humans operate except we're not allowed to
| operate like that.
|
| While harder to do as a human, if memorised a copyrighted book
| and then did a live reading on TV, or produced replicas from
| memory and sold them (the most comparable example), I'd be
| sued.
|
| Humans produce derivative work all the time, and it's fine for
| LLM's to do that, but you can't do it verbatim.
| logicchains wrote:
| >or produced replicas from memory and sold them (the most
| comparable example), I'd be sued.
|
| This is not the most comparable example, because it's not
| what ChatGPT is doing. The most comparable example is if you
| were hired as a contractor and the employer asked you to
| write verbatim some copyright content you'd memorised. If the
| employer then published it, they'd be the one liable, not
| you.
|
| >Humans produce derivative work all the time, and it's fine
| for LLM's to do that, but you can't do it verbatim.
|
| Nobody's suggesting preventing humans from consuming any
| copyrighted content just because in future they might recite
| some of it verbatim, but that's what NYT want for LLMs.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > The most comparable example is if you were hired as a
| contractor and the employer asked you to write verbatim
| some copyright content you'd memorised. If the employer
| then published it, they'd be the one liable, not you.
|
| No, you'd both be liable. You are not allowed to create
| copies of a copyrighted work, even from memory, for any
| commercial purpose. Making it public or not is irrelevant.
|
| This is more obvious with spftware: if I copy a version of
| AutoCAD that my previous employer bought and sell it to
| another company, or even just use it for my current
| employer without showing it to anyone else, I am violating
| the copyright on that software, and I am liable. Even
| though obviously no "publishing" happened.
|
| Similarly, if you hire a decorator to paint Mickey Mouse on
| the inside walls of your private kindergarten, the
| decorator is violating Disney's copyright just as much as
| you are, even if neither of you has made that public.
| YuccaGloriosa wrote:
| Your previous employer never bought AutoCAD, they
| licenced its use, paying a subscription. When you start
| working for them that licence was no longer available to
| you. So you would be unable to subsequently use it.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Unable legally, but I may find illegal ways. And the
| reason it is illegal to copy is copyright at the end. The
| license is only (legally) required because of copyright.
| kromem wrote:
| Then we should be focused on policing the _usage_ of the
| model, not the _training_ of it.
|
| That's the point at which infringement occurs in your
| example. It's not the memorizing that's the infringement,
| it's the reproduction from your memory.
|
| We shouldn't be regulating your hippocampus encoding the
| book, but your reproducing the book from that encoding.
|
| Similarly, we shouldn't be regulating the encoding of
| material into the NN, but the NN spitting back out the
| material.
| CJefferson wrote:
| Are those LLMs independant citizens we are going to give rights
| to? Then I'm fine with that.
|
| Are they all owned by one mega-corporation, which is going to
| do as capitalism does, and use them to squeeze money out of all
| of us? Then I'm happy to ban them.
| kromem wrote:
| "Let's ban something capable of diagnosing medical conditions
| and letting coma patients to communicate with an EEG because
| it learned the relationships between words from a giant data
| set of scraped data and is owned by a company" is a pretty
| callous take IMO.
|
| The opportunity cost of holding this technology back is going
| to literally be millions of people's lives given current
| trends in its emerging applications.
|
| Police usage, not training.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Memorising isn't the issue. It's providing it back verbatim
| and/or cutting access to the source.
|
| You'd get the same problem with someone with a photographic
| memory who a group of people would turn to recite them the news
| instead of buying the newspaper.
|
| As of now public performance of copyrighted material is
| infringement.
| kromem wrote:
| That's not the case, as they aren't trying to get a ruling on
| the forced reproduction by prompt as infringement, but rather
| to get a ruling that training is infringement.
|
| I fully agree with the perspective that infringement in
| _usage_ needs to be limited even if I strongly disagree that
| _training_ is infringement.
| jrockway wrote:
| I read about this in the Times today (and am surprised that it
| wasn't on HN already).
|
| My guess is that the court will likely find in the Times favor,
| because the legal system won't be able to understand how training
| works and because people are "scared" of AI. To me, reading a
| book, putting it in some storage system, and then recalling it to
| form future thoughts is fair use. It's what we all do all the
| time, and I think that's exactly what training is. I might say
| something like "I, for one, welcome our new LLM overlords". Am I
| infringing the copyright of The Simpsons? No.
|
| I am guessing some technicality like a terms-of-use violation of
| the website (avoidable if you go to the library and type in back
| issues of the Times), or storing the text between training
| sessions is what will do OpenAI in here. The legal system has
| never been particularly comfortable with how computers work; for
| example, the only reason EULAs work is because you "copy"
| software when your OS reads the program off of disk into memory
| (and from memory into cache, and from cache into registers). That
| would be copyright infringement according to courts, so you have
| to agree to a license to get that permission.
|
| I think the precedent on copyright law is way off base, granting
| too much power to authors and too little to user. But because
| it's so favorable towards "rightsholders", I expect the Times to
| prevail here.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| My hard drive can - bit for bit - recall video files. If I
| serve them to other people on the internet without permission
| of the copyright holder, that's called piracy.
| ninjinxo wrote:
| But is it still piracy if you compress them and serve only a
| likeness of the original?
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| If 20% of a NYT article is recalled correctly, does that
| mean I can publish 20% of a movie if surrounded by junk?
| What if I do that 5 times over?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Yes.
| jrockway wrote:
| Yeah, but the LLMs can't. They aren't big enough to contain
| every byte of every NYT article, even with the best-known
| compression algorithms. Rather, they pick up and remember the
| same patterns that humans do when they write. Authors of the
| articles also did that, and so the two algorithms (human
| writer, LLM inference) end up with the same result. (That
| doesn't preclude large chunks of text that are actually
| remembered, though. We humans have large chunks of verbatim
| text floating around in our brains. Passwords, phone numbers,
| "I pledge allegiance to the flag...", etc.)
|
| Anyway, like I said, I don't think OpenAI will win this.
| Someone will produce one verbatim article and the court will
| make OpenAI pay a bunch of money as though every article
| could be reproduced verbatim, and AI in the US will be set
| back that many billion dollars. It probably doesn't matter in
| the long run; it preserves the status quo for as long as the
| judge is judging and the newspaper exec is newspaper exec-
| ing. That's all they need. The next generation will have to
| figure out how to deal with AI-induced job loss... and
| climate change. Have fun, next generation!
| pests wrote:
| I don't agree that an LLM is doing what we are doing.
|
| "Its what we do all the time" is a major assumption
| tsimionescu wrote:
| In general, if you perform copyrighted works you are doing
| copyright infringement. There are certain exceptions (personal
| use, education, very small fragments with proper attribution,
| maybe a few others) but whether you are reading it aloud from a
| book or performing it from memory makes no difference.
|
| So, if you setup a service like ChatGPT but powered by humans
| responding real time to queries, and these humans would
| occasionally reproduce large chunks of NYT articles, they and
| the service itself would be liable for copyright infringement.
| Even if they were all reproducing these from memory.
|
| Now, this is somewhat different from the discussion of whether
| training the model on the copyrighted data, even if it had
| effective protections from returning copies of it, constitutes
| copyright infringement in itself. I believe this is a somewhat
| novel legal question and I can think of no direct corollaries.
|
| I certainly don't think we can just handwave and say "at some
| level, when a human reads a copyrighted work, they are doing
| the same thing", because we really don't know if that is true.
| Artifical neural networks certainly have no direct similarity
| with the neural networks in the brain as far as we can tell.
| And, even if they did, there is no reason to give a machine the
| same rights that a human has - certainly not until that machine
| can prove sentience.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| It's extremely speculative to claim that LLM models are
| basically doing what humans do. There is very clearly something
| that isn't right about that because in order for a human to
| learn to speak and converse and they don't need to imbibe the
| entire corpus of all written text in human history - which is
| basically what we're doing with these LLMs. What we're giving
| them is vast amounts of data which is totally unlike how humans
| work. There's very clearly some gap here between what a LLM is
| doing and what a human is doing. So you can't use that as a
| basis to justify why it's ok for OpenAI to operate like this.
|
| To put it another way, let's say I turn the dial all the way
| the other way, I train the worlds crappest LLM on NYT material,
| it massively massively overfits and all it will ever return is
| verbatim snippets of the NYT. Is that copyright infringement?
|
| The core part of the argument here is actually just that OpenAI
| doesn't want to adhere to what the current standard is for
| using copyrighted material, if you want to use it and create
| something new with it you need to license the material. Since
| OpenAI's LLM isn't _actually_ like a human it needs to license
| such a vast dataset that it would be uneconomical to run the
| business without stealing all the content.
| kazinator wrote:
| Should be: "NY Times wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances".
| You wouldn't want the hapless rabble misreading it as an "aiii"
| diphthong.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Are you confusing the _New York Times_ with the _New Yorker_?
| chmod600 wrote:
| Isn't copyright tethered somehow to a notion of "expression"?
| That is, the same ideas and facts expressed differently are a
| different work?
|
| Sure, when something is clearly derived, or just expressed in a
| new medium, then I'm sure it's still covered. But if it goes
| through an LLM and the result bears little resemblance, how can
| that still fall under copyright?
| visarga wrote:
| As you said AI can rewrite articles, obtaining a clean cut
| separation between ideas and expression. Keep the ideas, write
| a new text. And if you got multiple sources, the more sources
| you use the better, it would make the output be even more
| different. This approach could also check consistency and bias
| between sources.
| wseqyrku wrote:
| Sounds like 2024 is gonna be the year of lawsuits like this.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Nothing will come out of it. NY times will lose.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Means nothing.
|
| An ambit claim that Rupert is throwing out there to see what he
| can get.
| munchinator wrote:
| Why hasn't the Times also sued the Internet Archive? They've
| tried to block both the Internet Archive [1] and Open AI [2] from
| archiving their site, but why have they only sued OAI and not IA?
| The fact that they haven't sued IA which has comparatively little
| money would seem to indicate that this is not about fair use per
| se, but simply about profit-seeking and the NYT is selecting
| targets with deep pockets like OAI/MS.
|
| [1] https://theintercept.com/2023/09/17/new-york-times-
| website-i...
|
| [2] https://fortune.com/2023/08/25/major-media-organizations-
| are...
| killingtime74 wrote:
| What's wrong with that? If I was the NY Time's lawyers that
| what I would advise. What would it serve to bankrupt the IA,
| they can't pay anyway? These are corporations enforcing their
| rights against one another.
|
| There is nothing wrong with profit seeking from your copyright.
| That's literally their entire business model...they publish
| copyrighted content which they sell for a subscription.
|
| OpenAI and others could easily have negotiated a licence
| instead of just using the data. They bet that it would be
| cheaper to be sued, lets find out if they bet correctly.
|
| Tangentially that's what Apple did with the sensor in their
| watch, it doesn't always pay off.
| munchinator wrote:
| > What would it serve to bankrupt the IA, they can't pay
| anyway?
|
| It would serve the termination of the infringement.
|
| My point is that the Times doesn't particular seem to care
| about infringement per se, they care about getting their
| slice of the cut from that infringement.
|
| It's like if a video game company or a movie company only
| attempted to sue illegal downloaders who had a certain net
| worth.
| sensanaty wrote:
| > It's like if a video game company or a movie company only
| attempted to sue illegal downloaders who had a certain net
| worth.
|
| I mean yeah, no one's gonna bother trying to squeeze money
| out of Joe Schmoe with 10 bucks in his bank account over
| some pirated movies. If a company with billions and
| billions of dollars like Netflix started pushing out
| pirated movies instead, then obviously they'd be sued into
| oblivion, as they should be.
| sgt101 wrote:
| I think that the moment you start making big money from someone
| else's business is the moment that they get riled. That and
| when you really hurt their business. I suspect that the NYtimes
| thinks that IA is damaging them in the order of (possibly)
| $100k pa, and that it thinks that OpenAI is making in the order
| of $10M's from their content (and possibly doing some damage as
| well). It's an easy commercial decision to ignore one and go
| after the other - especially as going after IA is going to
| create some backlash as well.
| Shrezzing wrote:
| Copyright doesn't stop the collection of content, it stops the
| copying, processing, & redistribution of content. Internet
| Archive acts as a library, so its widely accepted as fair-use
| when it makes collections of webpages available.
|
| OpenAI's distribution is materially different to that of a
| library, so it's not a like-for-like comparison.
|
| One of the main tests of copyright law (at least in the US) is
| if the entity distributing is _selling_ the copied/derivative
| work. It's unambiguous that OpenAI is selling something akin to
| derivative works, which is why NYT feels they can go after this
| claim. Meanwhile IA's operations don't create sales or incur
| profits, so while NYT's legal team may be able to establish
| that copies have been distributed, without the _sale_ aspect of
| the infringement, judges aren't guaranteed to side with NYT in
| an legally expensive PR nightmare.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Microsoft is one of the companies that love to use copyright to
| get their way, BSA is known software mafia, so I'm not at all
| sympathetic to them.
| bdd8f1df777b wrote:
| I see few people here bring this up, so let me:
|
| The US constitution says, The Congress shall have Power
|
| > To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing
| for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to
| their respective Writings and Discoveries;
|
| So the Congress's power to make copyright and patent laws is
| predicated on promotion of science and useful arts (I believe
| this actually means technology). In a sense, the OpenAI being the
| forefront of our AI technology advancement is crucial to the
| equation. To hinder the progress by copyright is, in my mind,
| unconstitutional.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Current AI is useless without people writing the articles in
| the first place.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Wishful thinking. Just as equally, NYT's right to copyright
| over its material, in order to have a functional press, is
| enshrined the constitution. Anyone threatening _that_ copyright
| could be unconstitutional.
|
| I think we all agree that no one is entitled to "progress of
| science" at _any_ cost - as a straw man, killing hundreds of
| newborn babies for scientific research is not great - so we use
| ethics and the legal system to find the line of what's
| acceptable.
|
| I don't know exactly what NYT is asking for here, but the two
| options aren't unconsented training vs nothing at all. NYT
| could license, for a fee, its content to OpenAI. It's pretty
| common for scientists to have to pay for materials!
| skc wrote:
| Kind of ironic that the NYT will still have to host articles
| extolling the virtues of OpenAI as it continues to expand and
| upend industries
| globular-toast wrote:
| > To me, reading a book, putting it in some storage system, and
| then recalling it to form future thoughts is fair use. It's what
| we all do all the time, and I think that's exactly what training
| is.
|
| If the AI can recall the text verbatim then it's not at all the
| same. When we read we are not able to reproduce the book from our
| memory. Even if a human could memorise an entire book it's not at
| all practical to reproduce the book from that. The current AIs
| are not learning "ideas", they are learning orders of words.
| contravariant wrote:
| Yeah the comparison to humans is silly anthropomorphising at
| this point.
|
| However I am inclined to agree with them for the simple fact
| that putting a file into a device and letting that device
| reproduce parts of the file should be allowed. I mean we're
| already at the point where this simple right is under pressure
| from DRM, but people should be allowed to do whatever they want
| with the files they own.
|
| Whether you can publish this output and share it with the world
| is a whole different issue.
| munchinator wrote:
| It's interesting to me the ambiguous attitude people have to
| reproducing news content. Whenever there is a story from NYT on
| HN (or any other large media outlet), the top comment is almost
| always a link to an archived version which reproduces the text
| verbatim.
|
| And this seems to be tolerated as the norm. And yet, whenever
| there is a submission about a book, a TV show, a movie, a video
| game, an album, a comic book, or any other form of IP, it is in
| fact very much _not_ the norm for the top-rated comment to be a
| Pirate Bay link.
|
| I think that's something worth reflecting on, about why we feel
| it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other IP.
|
| And the reason I bring this up, is that it seems like Open AI has
| the same attitude: scraping news articles is OK, or at worst a
| gray area, but what if they were also scraping, for example,
| Netflix content to use as part of their training set?
| Erratic6576 wrote:
| I find "4nn4'$ 4rch1v3 dot ORG" actually way better than pirate
| bay for pirating knowledge.
|
| It's amazing the amount of books that copyright laws prevent us
| from finding
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-m...
| munchinator wrote:
| Sure. It's just curious to me that news article have a
| pirated knowledge link as the de facto top comment, but link
| submissions to, for example, books for sale on Amazon don't
| have a link to Anna's Archive or equivalent.
| Txmm wrote:
| I think the archive of an article is more preservation of
| history and maintaining records of events which often
| disappear if not archived. The number of threads
| referencing articles which are defunct is always
| increasing. A book or movie or original content on the
| other hand will continue to hold its own commercial value
| so reproducing it is more akin to an actual loss for the
| license holder.
|
| Definitely a grey area when that content is then used to
| train models though.
| Baldbvrhunter wrote:
| I would say 9 times out of 10 it's to get around the
| paywall and absolutely not some higher moralistic
| preservation of history.
|
| And everything is a grey area, determining the line is
| the existential purpose of these court cases.
|
| We've been here before with hyperlinking, then indexing
| and then linking with previews and the Canadian Facebook
| stuff but I think this has more standing.
| nulbyte wrote:
| If I buy a book, I get a work of literature. But if I buy
| a news subscription I get a series of facts riddled with
| advertisements. I accept the former, but I oppose the
| latter. I suspect I'm not the only one.
| Baldbvrhunter wrote:
| I don't fully understand what you're opposing.
|
| is it?
|
| 1) that you paid for news
|
| 2) that it included ads
|
| both are just the price you want to pay. There are
| various state news outlets that you're probably already
| paying for - npr, pbs, bbc, cncb depending on your region
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| That's why you don't pay for news?
|
| There are browser extensions that block ads. They are
| called ad blockers.
| ralfd wrote:
| That is an apples to oranges comparison. An article about a
| video/book would have the relevant information in text form
| without needing to show the video "here is the new stuff shown
| in Apples 2 hour long WWDC keynote". If not is common that a
| comment in the discussion gives a summary as a tl;dr
|
| With text articles behind paywalls the relevant information is
| hidden and only hinted at as a teaser.
| munchinator wrote:
| To make it an apples to apples comparison, look at
| submissions where the link submitted is the retail link to
| the IP. For example, look at all the book link submissions on
| AMZN...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=amazon.com
|
| None of these have the Pirate Bay or Library Genesis or
| Anna's Archive or the equivalent as the top comment.
|
| Compare that to...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nytimes.com
|
| And almost all of these have an archived version as the top
| comment.
| tmhrtly wrote:
| I wonder if this is because the purpose of linking to a
| book is to share awareness of that book's existence -
| nobody is about to go and read it then and there to comment
| on its contents. Whereas the purpose of an article is to
| discuss it now, in the comments - the consumption horizon
| and bulk of the content is different.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| If NYT was a HN startup the link to the archived version would
| be banned and dang would be slamming the ban hammer.
| 1f60c wrote:
| Please don't post baseless accusations. I think dang has said
| that he tries to moderate less, not more, when YC companies
| are involved. (Although it's impossible to say what he would
| do in this situation.)
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| HN is currently facilitating piracy. Something your comment
| failed to address.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Like I said in another comment it is simpler than that. They
| just serve the login page/payment page to all HTTP requests.
| If they do that then the submission itself likely get's
| flagged as there is no workaround (just like if I submit my
| blog with a banner saying "hey you pay me $1 to read my cool
| post")
| Popeyes wrote:
| Possibly because once an article is published the author
| receives no further payment. In all other mediums, there are
| residuals and royalties to be paid to the creators of the work.
| manojlds wrote:
| And add to that fact that NYT subscription is hard to
| unsubscribe from. People have aversion to NYT, even setting
| aside the bias.
| hef19898 wrote:
| It took me all of 5 minutes to cancel my digital NYT
| subscription from the following month onward. No idea what
| you are talking about.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Why did it take you five minutes instead of twenty
| seconds? It should be as simple as clicking on the link
| to your profile then clicking unsubscribe, mere seconds
| not minutes.
|
| Assuming you just said five minutes figuratively... Do
| you live in California or some other legal jurisdiction
| that forces them to play nice? Did you subscribe through
| some other company, like Apple?
|
| Horror stories about unsubscribing from the NYTimes are
| easy to find in the archive if you search for it. They
| make you call and chat to a retention specialist on the
| phone. This should help you have an idea of what he's
| talking about: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page
| =0&prefix=false&qu...
| hef19898 wrote:
| International one, as szraight forward as it could be: go
| to profile, go to manage subscription, cancel
| subscription, answer question why if you want, confirm
| cancellation, done for date depending on subscription.
| cruano wrote:
| That's only been true for the past few months, and it's
| been very well documented how complicated the cancelation
| process used to be [0].
|
| It's funny because I use PayPal for any unknown-to-me
| site where I don't want to give out my card, but the only
| site where I've needed their help to cancel something was
| the New York Times.
|
| [0] https://www.nirandfar.com/cancel-new-york-times/
| afavour wrote:
| Articles have ads on them, how are they not residual payments
| based on views?
| nulbyte wrote:
| I believe GP was referring to payments to the writer, not
| the publisher.
| Popeyes wrote:
| Yes, although I get that the route of the money may find
| it's way back to the journalist as salary. But generally
| goes into a pot for news gathering of which the salary
| will be withdrawn.
|
| On ads it's acceptable to distribute them freely and it
| is advantageous to the company. Can we also see good
| journalism as an ad for the quality of a broader product?
| perihelions wrote:
| If it takes 120 seconds to read a newspaper article, the
| archive.is workflow is a significant overhead over that, a
| significant friction. Those links are a courtesy to other HN
| readers. This is very different from the economics of buying
| and reading a book.
|
| _" Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing
| problem._"
|
| edit: It didn't even occur to me to compare the time-cost of
| "just pay for the article", but: last I read, it's half an hour
| of work to cancel a _New York Times_ subscription [0]. So, that
| option 's not even on the table.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26174269 ( _" Before
| buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel
| it"_, 812 comments)
| eropple wrote:
| _> edit: It didn 't even occur to me to compare the time-cost
| of "just pay for the article", but: last I read, it's half an
| hour of work to cancel a New York Times subscription [0]. So,
| that option's not even on the table._
|
| I canceled mine two weeks ago. It was four clicks. One
| annoyed me because they tried to get me to stay with an
| offer, but I didn't drop them because of the price.
| dillydogg wrote:
| Same experience here, it was effortless. But it is enough
| to justify stealing from those journalists, it seems.
| Germont wrote:
| To me, there is a sense that the news, which is real
| information about the society that we currently live in, should
| be availabe to all participants of that society. The notion of
| being a good citizen requires that one stays informed. Books,
| movies, videogames etc. don't have that role and are more
| consumption goods.
| afavour wrote:
| It's a difficult problem with no great answers. If you want
| news to be free at the point of delivery you want public
| service news agencies. But that means they're owned by the
| government... who are frequently the target of critical
| reporting.
| bongripper wrote:
| That's not true. You can have Independent public
| broadcasting that is not owned by the government and is
| reporting critically on it.
| afavour wrote:
| It's still a difficult tension. The government will
| always control the purse strings so independence is
| always going to come with conditions.
| vidarh wrote:
| The Guardian in the UK is an example of an alternative:
| It is owned by a trust, which funds it.
|
| Norway has substantial public media funding across the
| political spectrum, but as you point out it always comes
| with conditions, even is less so than the funding for the
| state owned broadcaster.
|
| Combining the two models and putting public funds into
| several perpetual trusts intended to provide funding from
| their profits at arms length from any sitting government
| similar to the (private) trust funding The Guardian might
| be an interesting alternative.
|
| (EDIT: Norway also has its own variation over The
| Guardian model - the second largest media group was
| founded by unions but is now majority owned by the
| combination of two public benefit trusts)
| guhidalg wrote:
| I agree, but nothing worth having is free. NYT and other news
| outlets have to ultimately pay reporters to go out into the
| world and do the work. The reporters are not priests, and the
| NYT is not a church that lives off donations and tax
| exemptions. They need money to operate, and you may disagree
| with how they try to collect that money (paywall) but that
| doesn't solve their funding problem.
|
| How would you pay for news otherwise?
| Ntrails wrote:
| > How would you pay for news otherwise?
|
| You could subsidise news via "public service" style
| stipends. Much like having a government owned "independent"
| news service (eg the BBC) this comes with a high risk of
| corruption. Don't bite the hand that feeds and all that.
|
| You could implement a much lower friction non-recurring
| payment system. I'd be far more tempted to drop a little
| money on a fixed term (5 articles, 1 day, ???) setup than a
| subscription.
|
| Realistically, I am not paying for more than 1 long running
| sub. And there are > that number of solid outlets.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Realistically, I am not paying for more than 1 long
| running sub. And there are > that number of solid
| outlets.
|
| This is somewhat what Apple News+ works like, but I doubt
| most news orgs want to be held captive by Apple.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > I'd be far more tempted to drop a little money on a
| fixed term (5 articles, 1 day, ???) setup than a
| subscription.
|
| I believe that's often referred to as a newspaper, which
| should be available in all good newsagents on any given
| day.
| ahoka wrote:
| Not everything is news that appears in a newspaper. There are
| opinion pieces, etc.
| JackFr wrote:
| > should be available to all participants of that society.
|
| Who pays?
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| The government (thus the people, in a so called sharing of
| public burden)!
|
| For example in Hungary there is an official news agency ran
| by the government, with (cumbersome) free access for
| everybody. Of course this does provide somewhat biased
| presentation of some facts, but on many topics it provides
| unbiased access to news for any citizen.
|
| This is actually pretty common in Europe, often funded by
| mandatory fees (for some reason not branded as taxes)
| certain appliance owners need to pay (UK TV license, German
| Rundfunkbeitrag). For this fee people get access to news
| and cultural programmes for free via different media
| (radio, TV, internet).
| bongripper wrote:
| I agree with your general point but Hungary is probably
| the worst example you could have chosen from any EU
| country! The Orban government is famously using it to
| spread propaganda and fake information in unprecedented
| levels.
|
| The level of control governments exert on public
| broadcasting networks is widely different. Since Meloni,
| the RAI in Italy is facing similar issues, but Hungary is
| still the canonic example of government misinformation
| and propaganda.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| That is a orthogonal to the discussion we were having.
| The topic was whether people should have free access to
| news, and how should it be financed, not the quality of
| that news.
|
| People have free access to public roads all around the
| world, and the quality wildly differs in that as well.
| Also the quality of for-profit news services does differ
| wildly, you might have an opinion about that of fox news,
| for example, but that is also off topic in this
| discussion.
| nulbyte wrote:
| > That is a orthogonal to the discussion we were having.
| The topic was whether people should have free access to
| news, and how should it be financed, not the quality of
| that news.
|
| On the contrary, the quality of the news is very
| important to the discussion. There is no point in making
| trash freely available to the public, after all.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| The topic is a bit more nuanced, and far wider than "not
| fitting my favourite narrative on some topics, so it is
| generally and objectively trash".
|
| think about this: I will get mostly objective and useful
| reports of the flood approaching my home near the river
| regardless the narrative/interpretation they might have
| on some other topics, or the biased reporting on the
| merits of the government in handling the situation at the
| dams.
|
| For me I'm not here to debate on the political policies
| of some governments, just gave a few examples of ways to
| fund public access to news. This discussion is over from
| my part.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No it isn't an orthogonal discussion. The reason Orban
| wants people to have free access to his propaganda is
| because it directly serves his purpose. To finance it
| directly from sales of the media would defeat the
| purpose. Coupled with Orban's attack on free media it
| completes the picture.
| bongripper wrote:
| I would argue the people of Hungary would be better off
| without hatred against asylum seekers and minorities,
| political opponents, lies and misinformation.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Yes, someone needs to pay.
|
| I see the gp post about pirating news as a very good point,
| while having no veleity to pay the New York Times, and
| being ok with not reading it in general.
|
| But I also pay for my national (public) news outlet, and
| their articles are available to anyone anywhere in the
| world. I don't know how it should work, but I wish we could
| get to a system where the burden to keep news outlet alive
| is split thinly enough to have open but viable publications
| around the world.
|
| Basically the same way weather stations collaborate all
| other the world and we pay for our local stations while
| getting acccess to all the forecast everywhere.
| concordDance wrote:
| There's a few possible models here:
|
| Public donors ALA Patreon
|
| People doing it in their free time because they care a lot
| about the subject (nowadays with things like Twitter its
| quite possible for an independent obsessive to write a good
| piece on, for instance, the Ukraine War by mostly referring
| to open sources and public announcements by governments and
| corporations)
|
| Government sponsorship ala BBC
| danielheath wrote:
| Everyone, if you don't...
| philwelch wrote:
| Every news source has biases. Under the paywall business
| model, the people who share the biases of their favored
| news outlets pay for them, and in exchange, they get to
| ensconce themselves inside a bubble free of dissenting
| viewpoints. This also reinforces the bias of the news
| outlet; if they don't toe the line, they will lose
| subscribers.
|
| Instead of paying news outlets to provide ourselves with
| filtered feeds of content that match our own biases, we
| could instead pay news outlets to produce competing streams
| of explicit propaganda to be freely disseminated. The
| overall bias and quality of the news would be largely
| unchanged, even if the biases were more obvious; in fact,
| it may even improve.
| Baldbvrhunter wrote:
| what about wordle or the crossword or the cooking section
|
| https://cooking.nytimes.com/
| pawelmurias wrote:
| > which is real information
|
| People post archive links even to fake NY Times.
| sumedh wrote:
| > which is real information about the society that we
| currently live in, should be availabe to all participants of
| that society.
|
| Who should pay the journalists or the investigative
| reporters?
| malermeister wrote:
| The state, through taxes. It's a public good after all.
| rickydroll wrote:
| I'm of a similar mind. I take the more expansive view that
| everything created is part of our common property and that
| something like an LLM should be able to yield the summary and
| references to those creations. As I've said elsewhere, LLM
| systems might be our first practical example of an infinite
| number of monkeys typing and recreating Shakespeare (or the
| New York Times).
|
| I understand that copyrights and patents are vehicles for
| ensuring a creator gets paid for their work, but they are
| flawed in not rewarding multiple parallel creations and that
| they last too long.
| briansm wrote:
| a LLM is just a hugely lossy-compressed version of its
| training data, an abstraction of it.
|
| Much in the same way as when you read a book, your brain
| doesn't become a pirated copy of the text as you only store
| a hugely compressed version of it afterwards, a feeling for
| the plot, generated images and so on.
| rickydroll wrote:
| That's what I thought from my various readings about LLM
| systems. I'm guessing that the kerfuffle from the New
| York Times and other shortsighted organizations is that
| copyright allows them to control how their content is
| used. With humans, it's simple as its read and
| misremembered. Using it for LLM training requires a
| different model. It probably should be a RAND fee system
| based on volume of training data because, as you say, the
| training data is converted into an abstract form.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It is am ethical grey area, but if the paywall applied to all
| user agents, which would make it similar to say buying a Kindle
| book, then you might see that as pirating, whereas if you use
| an archive service that was served the HTTP response and cached
| it, then you are using a proxy UA.
|
| If the news/magazine doesn't want this they can simple serve a
| cut down or zero length article to all non-paying viewers! But
| they want that SEO, and they want that marketing.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| Indeed there are media that are hard paywalled, e.g., the
| information. However these are prohibited on HN, which
| possibly create additional bias towards non-hard-paywalled
| publications
| Yizahi wrote:
| We can extend this analogy. What if someone put up a proxy,
| that has a legal Netflix subscription and which "watches"
| streams of Netflix shows, captures actual RGB values of
| pixels and re-streams the resulting video to anyone else?
| Isn't it the same "proxy" excuse?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I would say no because the site was happy to serve the
| content publicly, whereas your proxy is breaking a
| contractual agreement. Now we get into terms of service of
| a website, and even if you visit for free you agree to
| them. Which is a possible point. It is quite grey IMO. In
| terms of HN I reckon a mag would love the free brand rec.
| vs. the archive not being shared. Where it hurts them is if
| someone is avoiding paying for a subscription by
| continually using archive sites.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Good comment, it was very funny to see how people desperately
| try to find moral justification for pirating media A but not B.
| "It's apples to oranges, you see, there are less letters in the
| NYT article than in the book and they are rendered differently,
| so it is ok to pirate their work. I did nothing wrong!" :)
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| It is actually pirating content by companies for humongous
| profit, or pirating by individual human beings for free
| access to culture and entertainment, oftentimes for content
| one has already paid for, but rendered inaccessible by
| megacorporations.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Which content making businesses earn humorous profit
| margins?
|
| Are all the journalist layoffs a fever dream?
|
| This is one of the more profitable ones, and only because
| they employ unscrupulous tactics:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NWS/news/profit-
| ma...
|
| This is NYT, the most successful news business:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-
| times...
|
| As for movies/tv show/music makers, let's just say most
| people in the software engineering business would look at
| their numbers and count their lucky stars that they are not
| in the movie/tv show/music business.
|
| (It is also true that excessive copyright lengths have
| removed access to content that the public should have a
| right to).
| defrost wrote:
| > Which content making businesses earn humorous profit
| margins?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_(magazine)
|
| https://www.theonion.com/
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| The movie/tv show and music business can keel over and
| die tomorrow - it wouldn't affect the value of art
| produced by humans at all. I see those more as
| exploitative leeches than as contributing anything
| positive.
|
| If only piracy would actually harm these businesses but
| alas as often demonstrated it has zero effect on their
| bottom line, if anything it increases their profits.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| What do you mean by "art"?
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| Hard question, but in the context of my comment I would
| say any kind of visual media or music
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| > Which content making businesses earn humorous profit
| margins?
|
| You got my point backwards: AI companies will make it
| from the pirated content, that individual users don't
| make.
| amelius wrote:
| There's no way to get your money back if you didn't like the
| content. If they don't want their articles to be read for
| free then they should keep them out of my view. And certainly
| not use clickbaity headlines. Information can be copied and
| they should accept it, or change their business/distribution
| model.
| Yizahi wrote:
| So if I went to a cinema and didn't like the movie, I
| should be entitled for a return, right? Or if I went into a
| museum and didn't like the art displayed there?
|
| If you are advocating for a free for all libertarian
| dystopia, well, I have some bad news for you - they never
| work.
| amelius wrote:
| > So if I went to a cinema and didn't like the movie, I
| should be entitled for a return, right?
|
| Not being able to un-see a movie and get your time and
| money back is one side of the coin. The other side is
| that information can be copied.
|
| Both sides suck for one of the parties. There's no reason
| why one of them gets it their way, especially if it
| requires a contrived legal framework while the other way
| would require nothing at all.
| bena wrote:
| You're not paying to enjoy the content, you're paying to
| experience the content.
|
| And as long as you had the opportunity to experience the
| content, you've gotten what you paid for.
|
| I don't see "I don't like it" as a valid reason for a
| refund.
| amelius wrote:
| > You're not paying to enjoy the content, you're paying
| to experience the content.
|
| Not sure about others, but I'm not.
| bena wrote:
| Your personal opinion on the matter has little weight
| here.
|
| It doesn't matter what you _think_ you 're paying for or
| should be paying for, the fact of the matter is that
| you're paying for the effort people put in bringing that
| to you. So you are, whether you want to be or not.
| goatlover wrote:
| Would you make the same argument for a sporting,
| theatrical or music event? That you should be refunded if
| you didn't enjoy it?
| amelius wrote:
| Does it matter? Sounds to me like an apples and oranges
| comparison.
|
| If I read an article in the NYT then I'm paying for what
| I took away from it, not for the amount of time that it
| allowed me to kill.
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| I don't agree with the OP but how are refunds a free for
| all libertarian dystopia?
| Yizahi wrote:
| "Information can be copied and they should accept it" <-
| I was referring to this line. This basically means that
| OP thinks that any intellectual property should be free
| for everyone. This means that probably half of humanity
| (who are currently creating anything with IP) will have
| to be libertarians, and that can't happen unless all
| humanity are libertarians. And libertarian society is a
| dystopia. :)
| amelius wrote:
| > This basically means that OP thinks that any
| intellectual property should be free for everyone.
|
| Incorrect. Many intellectual property has a certain merit
| that can be demonstrated before it is consumed. E.g.
| "This piece of software allows you to create 3d models".
| On the other hand, an article with headline "Will new
| batteries allow 10x more energy storage?" does not tell
| me anything.
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| Of course pirating any media is totally fine from a moral
| standpoint.
| ks2048 wrote:
| It seems pretty natural to me. People generally have less
| problem with stealing a candy bar than stealing a car.
| (Consider the cost to produce a NYT article vs the cost to
| produce a Hollywood movie). I don't think the stealing-vs-
| pirating analogy is perfect, but it's related.
| dillydogg wrote:
| I wonder what the reaction of some of the people who browse
| this forum would be if the output of their careers were so
| commonly pirated. Somehow, I think most think that this
| argument doesn't apply.
| Demiurge wrote:
| I'd be pretty delighted. I'm paid for getting projects
| done, not for keeping hold on some copyrighted code. I want
| all my code to be open sourced, and reused.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| Blocking ads and avoiding payment are two different things.
| iinnPP wrote:
| The archive link doesn't threaten their jobs and helps them
| avoid paying for NYT. It's NIMBY, or rather it's true form of
| NIIIM (Not if it impacts me).
|
| Hypocrites are EVERYWHERE and are the majority.
| bnralt wrote:
| It is pretty funny. If you go back and read the comments made
| yesterday about ChatGPT doing something much milder (using
| old articles to train data, some prompts fused to allow you
| to reproduce some of the articles though now don't work), you
| have a lot of comments talking about how The New York Times
| needs money and Open AI is using their work without paying
| for it.
|
| Now a comment points out that HN News (and most of the
| internet) routinely does something much worse - allows people
| to bypass completely new articles in their entirety without
| paying - and almost all the comments are about how it's the
| New York Times fault for making it difficult to cancel
| subscription, the importance of news being available to
| everyone, the problems with copyright laws, etc.
| lexicality wrote:
| Funny, I don't see it as a moral thing but more a "what can you
| get away with" thing.
|
| I fully assume that if I was to post a magnet link to a torrent
| for whatever the link was about, I would be banned.
|
| Morally speaking, I think it's perfectly reasonable to download
| a copy of something and either read the relevant info for my
| current task or to sample it to decide if I want to buy it. I
| see it no different to using the library or browsing at a book
| store.
|
| Perhaps once news organisations can work out how to effectively
| wield the DMCA hammer against archive links we'll see the
| practice of posting them stop.
| midasuni wrote:
| So downloading a movie from piratebay is no different to
| using the library?
| kolinko wrote:
| In some jurisdictions (Poland, possibly whole of EU),
| downloading any kind of materials - be it movies, books or
| music - is legal. Uploading/sharing - if not between
| friends&family members - not so.
| mistercow wrote:
| I'd argue that morality always has a "what can you get away
| with" component. Things that are normalized tend to be seen
| as morally permissible, and things that are seen as abnormal
| are more likely to be seen as immoral.
|
| The problem with the thinking in the root comment is that it
| implicitly assumes that people's behavior is morally
| consistent, or that they even try particularly hard to behave
| in a morally consistent way. That's not really how people
| work. If you ask them to discuss morality in the abstract,
| they'll try to come up with a consistent system. But their
| actual behavior is mostly dictated by social norms. And if
| you try to pin them down on the morality of their concrete
| actions, they're more likely to stretch their moral system to
| accommodate their actions than the other way around.
|
| None of this is to say anything about my own opinions on news
| sharing or OpenAI's situation. It's just that someone
| decrying piracy but also posting/sharing/upvoting links to
| copies of news articles is neither surprising, nor indicative
| of some deeper nuance to how people view morality around IP.
| lupusreal wrote:
| This is only an interesting juxtaposition if you have fully
| internalized and accepted the myth of people and corporations
| being interchangeable.
| seydor wrote:
| it s also audacious how these news companies reproduce stories
| from social media and other electronic media of facts that are,
| like, freely available in nature. Or how they get embargos and
| exclusivity to government information as if they are some kind
| of information-bouncer
| puttycat wrote:
| They pirate movies as well:
|
| https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/an-artist-fights-back-and-...
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Historically newspapers leaned more on competition law than
| copyright, because their pages are _supposed_ to be filled with
| non-copyrightable facts.[1] Copying part, but not all, of a
| factual article, significantly after the relevant event, was
| considered to be a promotion (not unfair competition) and a
| nice thing to do for the journalists. Things change, people
| lose sight of the original principles.
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_News_Service_v...
| nsagent wrote:
| These days most news is mixed with analysis [1] (which is
| often biased). I wonder if part of the reason for this shift
| is that analysis is copyrightable. It also seems like the
| number of opinion articles is ever expanding [2], though I
| don't have any hard numbers on that.
|
| [1]:
| https://guides.library.cornell.edu/evaluate_news/source_bias
|
| [2]: https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/rise-of-opinion-
| section/ Interestingly there's a banner at the top of that
| link touting an agreement between Axel Springer and OpenAI.
|
| EDIT: formatting
| guipsp wrote:
| Even the facts are not copyrightable, the prose is.
| vel0city wrote:
| > their pages are supposed to be filled with non-
| copyrightable facts
|
| This is rather inaccurate. A fact is Hitler invades Poland.
| You're right, nobody can copyright this idea, as it is just a
| fact.
|
| However, if I then write a 500-word article describing the
| scene of Hitler invading Poland, have short quotes from some
| civilians there, etc. _that particular arrangement of ideas
| and words_ is copyright.
|
| AP can't go and sue INS for just reporting the fact Hitler
| invades Poland, but if INS takes a whole article word for
| word and reproduces it that's still violation of copyright.
| The actual printed words of the news _always_ had copyright.
|
| The WSJ can't claim copyright on the markets going up
| yesterday. They _can_ claim copyright on something like
| "After the bell rang in the NYSE, the tech industry ticked up
| 1.2% over last week. Meanwhile the whatever market took a hit
| of -0.5% ending the quarter slightly lower than our analysis
| expected. Blah blah blah..." If Investor's Business Daily
| wrote a different article that also talked about the markets
| ending up at the end of the day, that's not a violation of
| copyright. If they literally write "After the bell rang in
| the NYSE, the tech industry ticked up..." then they're
| violating WSJ's copyright. This was true before and after
| International News Service v Associated Press.
| nsagent wrote:
| Yes, the prose was always under copyright, but the key
| point for the case linked in the wikipedia article is:
|
| > INS members would rewrite the news and publish it as
| their own without attribution to AP.
|
| So the case hinged on INS indeed reporting facts that
| differed in exposition.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Largely because "news" aka facts is not and should not be
| copyrightable, so while the style, and exact format of the
| article may be copyrightable, the facts contained within are
| not.
|
| This makes a news story copyright murky in the eyes of wider
| society unlike a clearly 100% creative work like a TV Show or
| Movie.
|
| Further the news themselves self cannibalize, how many stories
| are just rewrites of stories from other outlets? why it is OK
| for the Washington Post to copy the NY times, but not ok for
| OpenAI or Archive.org?
| gnz11 wrote:
| Creative works like books, TV shows and movies contain facts
| too.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| None of which are copyrightable and infact has been the
| subject of DMCA abuse like when a Movie uses NASA footage
| and claims copyright on YouTube videos with the same
| footage.
|
| Copyright is a complex subject, and not as vast as many
| believe, at the same time ironically it is more vast than i
| believe it should be. copyright should be much more
| limiting than it is. Which is at odds with people that
| believe copyright should be maximized.
|
| Keeping in mind commercial success of a work, author or
| company is not why copyright exists. For the US, the only
| reason copyright can exist in our framework of law (i.e the
| constitution) is for the promotion of the useful sciences.
| No other purpose for copyright would be constitutional
| under the US Constitution
| gnz11 wrote:
| Copyright doesn't exist solely for the "promotion of
| useful sciences".
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Citing Wikipedia you already failed..
|
| That is a General Article about Copyright world wide, I
| Specifically stated US Copyright, which is Authorized by
| Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States
| Constitution[1], implicitly for the promotion of the
| useful sciences. That is where congress derives its power
| to pass copyright laws, and to enforce copyright on the
| people of the United States. No other purpose is
| authorized by the US Constitution
|
| [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/intellectual_property
| _clause
| vel0city wrote:
| You missed "and useful arts" in both of your comments.
| That's a key addition that you keep ommitting.
|
| It is not just for sciences.
| ks2048 wrote:
| _why it is OK for the Washington Post to copy the NY times,
| but not ok for OpenAI or Archive.org?_
|
| If the Washington Post printed an article from the NY Times
| nearly verbatim and without attribution, it would not be OK
| and surely they would take legal action.
| gnz11 wrote:
| Yes, because The NY Times is copyrighting the body of work.
| They are not copyrighting the "facts" themselves but the
| distillation of these facts into a body of work. Anyone is
| free to take the facts and produce their own works but not
| to lift the body of work verbatim that the NY Times created
| (plagiarize).
| maxboone wrote:
| Probably because the contents are what's posted, i.e. if
| someone would post a link to an interesting video behind
| paywall / login and there was an easy mirror available that'd
| be posted too.
|
| If I could just buy one article for a coffee without entering a
| bunch of PII or go through a time-wasting process I would agree
| on the moral equivalence between the examples.
| _rm wrote:
| If ChatGPT is based on neural networks, with no actual save-
| and-replicate facsimile behaviour, it no more "copies" original
| work than I do when I tell you about the news article I read
| today.
|
| I'd say the only real reason the Piratebay links thing you
| mentioned is not the norm is purely because those media sources
| have done a better job of striking fear into people doing that,
| so it's gone more underground. I.e. they're better terrorists.
|
| There's no fundamental, moral reason why Piratebay links being
| posted and raised to the top would be wrong.
| octacat wrote:
| So, if someone applies a filter to a video/audio, it is no
| more "copies" of the original work (no, it is still
| protected). AI still could produce exact or extremely similar
| results of stuff it learned on.
| concordDance wrote:
| > AI still could produce exact or extremely similar results
| of stuff it learned on.
|
| Can it do so more than a human can?
|
| I think that's the key here. If an AI is no more precise
| than a human telling you about the news article they read
| today then ChatGPT learning process probably can't be
| morally called copying.
| octacat wrote:
| So, if someone decompiles a program and compiles it
| again, it would look different. "It is not copying", we
| just did some data laundering.
|
| Feeding someone else data into your system is usually a
| violation of copyright. Even if you have a very "smart"
| system, trying to transform and obfuscate the original
| data.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| > Feeding someone else data into your system is usually a
| violation of copyright
|
| In some circumstances, yes, but often it's not,
| especially if you're not continuing to store and use it
| (which OpenAI isn't).
| _rm wrote:
| I'm regularly feeding other people's data into my
| "system" (brain) in order to produce my outputs.
|
| So I'm a living breathing copyright violator. As a person
| I should be banned.
|
| Fortunately, copyright is a bullshit fictitious right
| with no basis in natural law. So I don't lose much sleep
| over it.
| octacat wrote:
| Computers are deterministic. Giving the same inputs
| training would produce the same model. The comparison
| with brain is incorrect. You could add noise on input
| data during the training - it would more of less
| reproduce the real learning. Still, it could produce less
| useable models as a result.
|
| The court could ask to show the training dataset.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| It's not analogous to a filter, because that's applied to
| the actual work. The model does not keep the work, so what
| it does isn't like applying a filter. It's more like being
| able to reproduce a version of the work from memory and
| what it learned from that work and others about the
| techniques involved in crafting it, e.g. art students doing
| reproductions.
|
| And if OpenAI were selling the reproductions, that would be
| infringement. But that's not what's happening here. It's
| selling access to a system that can do countless things.
| vel0city wrote:
| > it no more "copies" original work than I do when I tell you
| about the news article I read today
|
| When you tell people about some news article you read earlier
| you repeat it exactly verbatim? You also give this out to
| potentially millions or hundreds of millions of people for
| commercial purposes?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Copyright law does not care about the means of copying, just
| that you created something with substantial similarity to
| something you had access to. Whether or not the copy is in
| the form of a pixel array, blobs of random data being XORd to
| produce a full copy of music, or rows in a key/value
| attention matrix, doesn't matter.
|
| Furthermore, there's Google research on extracting training
| set data from models. More specifically, Google found out
| that if you ask GPT to repeat the same word over and over
| again, forever, it eventually starts printing fully memorized
| training set data[0]. So it is memorizing stuff, even if it's
| not regurgitating it.
|
| [0] When told of this, OpenAI's response was to block
| conversations with large amounts of repeated words in them.
| caeril wrote:
| Oh it's worse than that. The NYT is positing that any neural
| network that is trained on their data, and can summarize or
| very closely approximate an article's content on request, is in
| violation.
|
| This reasoning would presumably apply to any neural network,
| including one made of neurons, dendrites, and axons. So any
| human reader of the NYT who is capable of accurately
| summarizing what they read is an evil copyright violator, and
| must be "deleted".
|
| Effectively, the NYT legal department is setting the stage for
| mass murder.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Hyperbole much? There is a difference between a computer and
| a person. I'm not aware that people generally can be enticed
| to reproduce full articles verbatim just through questioning.
| ako wrote:
| As far as I know schools have to pay for the newspaper
| articles they use in class to educate students. Training an
| AI seems similar.
|
| Here's a service for the UK providing paid access to
| copyrighted materials to schools:
| https://www.nlamediaaccess.com/newspapers-for-schools/
| mlindner wrote:
| At least in the US, copyright violation is a civil thing, it's
| handled by lawsuits. If the copyright violation is of such a
| small level that it's not worth the copyright owner to do
| anything about it then nothing's done. In this case it's worth
| a massive amount of money.
| davedx wrote:
| I pay for multiple streaming services because I get a decent
| amount of value from their content.
|
| I do not pay for any news websites because I read very little
| of what they produce, and it tends to pop up more on aggregator
| sites like HN than me actually going to them.
|
| I actually did have a subscription to The Telegraph for a few
| months at one point because initially I wanted to read a full
| article (without cheating). But eventually I cancelled because
| so much of it is polemic trash.
|
| That's my justification: I pay for things that have value to
| me.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > , a movie, a video game, an album, a comic book, or any other
| form of IP, it is in fact very much _not_ the norm for the top-
| rated comment to be a Pirate Bay link.
|
| Probably because most print media is garbage and nobody in
| their right mind would actually pay to read them
| davedx wrote:
| I don't understand the downvotes - it's an extremely valid
| opinion. If people ask questions like that then they should
| be able to accept forthright answers?
|
| (It's the same reason for me. I have tried news site subs but
| eventually got so tired of the polemic that I cancelled. I
| won't sub again).
| iudqnolq wrote:
| The obvious response is that if you don't like news and
| think it has no value then you don't have to read it.
| sumedh wrote:
| > Probably because most print media is garbage and nobody in
| their right mind would actually pay to read them
|
| NYTs revenue keeps growing though.
| namlem wrote:
| Not from newspaper sales
| octacat wrote:
| At least people do not obscure who is the original author of
| the content (so, if people like NYT articles - they could go
| and subscribe for more). Kinda "free advertising" (which still
| hurts the publisher in many cases, though). Same with search
| engines - as long as engine brings clicks - people are happy.
| If search engine just grabs the info and never redirects the
| user to the site - what is the point for the site to exist to
| begin with?
| initplus wrote:
| I would be "happier" to pay a subscription to an aggregation
| platforms like hackernews or reddit to access archived articles
| that are linked to these sites. In turn a proportion of that
| could be passed on to the underlying publishers that I actually
| visit. I have nearly zero interest in reading articles that
| aren't linked to from an aggregation site.
|
| I don't want to read theguardian.com, or nytimes.com, or
| washingtonpost.com, or bloomberg.com, I want to read
| news.ycombinator.com. Paying an individual subscription to
| every possible underlying site that could be linked to from
| news.ycombinator.com is a non-starter.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| This is a common statement, but every attempt to sell that
| service has been a dismal failure. See for example blendle.
| initplus wrote:
| Nearly every attempt at starting a new aggregation site
| like hackernews or reddit has been a failure.
|
| I'm not going to switch to a new website where no community
| exists just so I can pay for news articles. To work it
| needs to be integrated into an existing, successful
| aggregation website.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Blendle failed because they went into competition with the
| papers whose content they reproduced.
| nithril wrote:
| I would be happier to pay a small fee per article I want to
| read. But the norm seems a monthly subscription.
| elpocko wrote:
| Good observation. I now wanna start commenting with pirate
| links to other media, but HN would tear me to shreds real quick
| I guess.
| anonfromsomewhe wrote:
| it's similar to how easy it's to subscribe NY times and then
| how hard it's to unsubs. They require extra steps and it's well
| known. So They get what they deserve? Do you see the point.
| They are lie spreaders, nothing else
| cesarb wrote:
| > Whenever there is a story from NYT on HN (or any other large
| media outlet), the top comment is almost always a link to an
| archived version which reproduces the text verbatim. [...] And
| yet, whenever there is a submission about a book, a TV show, a
| movie, a video game, an album, a comic book, or any other form
| of IP, it is in fact very much _not_ the norm for the top-rated
| comment to be a Pirate Bay link.
|
| If the story was linking directly to the "book, TV show, movie,
| video game, album, comic book, etc", and the link only worked
| for some people while others randomly got a login request or
| similar, you'd also see the top comment being a link to an
| archived version which avoids the login screen. That is: the
| main difference is that the archive link has the exact same
| content as the link submitted in the story, only bypassing the
| login screen that _some_ people see. And the only reason the
| archive site has the content is that it didn 't get the login
| screen; if everyone always got the login screen, what you would
| see on the archive site would be the same login screen.
| some1else wrote:
| Okay.
|
| https://www.netflix.com/browse?jbv=81714181
| infecto wrote:
| i don't believe that is fully correct. The general policy
| here is that you cannot link to something that is paywalled
| unless that site plays the game of allowing crawlers but not
| actual human eyeballs. In the latter case the link is
| allowable because there are ways around it that the site
| owners allow.
| lagniappe wrote:
| I don't recall seeing this policy on HN guidelines.
| couchand wrote:
| It's on the FAQ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
|
| > Are paywalls ok?
|
| > It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that
| have workarounds.
| newyorkgritty wrote:
| Much of this is incorrect
|
| > the archive link has the exact same content as the link
| submitted
|
| No, articles are updated as new information comes in,
| retractions are made, etc. Especially breaking news (the type
| that would reach the top of HN). The archived versions are
| outdated.
|
| > others randomly got a login request
|
| It's not random, you get a number of free articles before the
| paywall appears ("soft" paywall).
|
| The paywall is removed entirely for some topics/stories,
| especially matters of public health (common during the
| pandemic).
|
| > the only reason the archive site has the content is that it
| didn't get the login screen
|
| No, it's because they don't block archive crawlers, and
| prefer people bypassing the paywall and reading news _at_
| NYT. Hopefully users find the content valuable, and some of
| them subscribe as a result.
|
| (opinions are my own)
| melenaboija wrote:
| So, what allows accessing content under IP illegally is not
| liking the marketing strategy of the content owner?
| tzs wrote:
| > I think that's something worth reflecting on, about why we
| feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other IP
|
| As you noted it is not the norm to post pirate links here for
| IP other than news articles, but that doesn't mean that a lot
| of people think it is not OK to pirate those other forms of IP.
|
| In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves video
| streaming there will be numerous posts from people explaining
| why they pirate (usually with ridiculous justifications like
| "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid
| service does exactly what I want now at a price that is trivial
| for me they might someday later change").
|
| The impression I've gotten is that piracy of nearly everything
| is widely felt to be OK here. Information wants to be free,
| yada yada.
|
| About the only piracy that is consistently frowned upon here is
| piracy of open source software. When some company sells an
| embedded device that uses GPL code without releasing the
| corresponding source that's viewed as just a little short of a
| crime against humanity.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > About the only piracy that is consistently frowned upon
| here is piracy of open source software. When some company
| sells an embedded device that uses GPL code without releasing
| the corresponding source that's viewed as just a little short
| of a crime against humanity.
|
| Like what you said...
|
| > Information wants to be free
| tomComb wrote:
| Yeah, I don't judge people for pirating or ad blocking, but
| the ludicrous justifications do get me - quite the entitled
| mental gymnastics. They remind me of bitcoin people trying to
| explain how mining is good for the environment.
| _jal wrote:
| There's a "polite society" thing going on.
|
| Briefly, something like:
|
| 1) Ycombinator could not tolerate HN becoming a site known
| for sharing IP-law-violating content. And the people who
| come here by and large are smart and socialized enough to
| implicitly understand why.
|
| 2) At the same time, a large number of folks here mostly
| wink and nod at that sort of consumer infringement. And
| there's a society-wide bias towards "things like news are
| less protected", so that gets to slide.
|
| 3) But people also have a need to tell consistent-seeming
| stories about how things work, thus the mental gymnastics.
|
| It ends up being similar to trying to explain why people
| pretend to be prudish innocents about sex. It largely
| reduces to "a small subset of the population goes
| sufficiently ballistic about what I consider to be
| relatively trivial stuff as to make it not worth fighting
| over, even if I find that to be ridiculous."
|
| There are a lot of different versions of this that become
| so normalized it can be hard to notice.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves
| video streaming there will be numerous posts from people
| explaining why they pirate (usually with ridiculous
| justifications like "subscribing is not an option because
| even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at
| a price that is trivial for me they might someday later
| change").
|
| I've read and participated in many such threads and I've
| literally never seen this take. Often what I see is
| complaints about having to learn different UI for different
| services/apps, no offline, ads injected into paid services,
| having to figure out which service a show is on, and
| generally terrible UI you can't change/fix.
|
| I don't think I've ever really seen someone use the argument
| "yes it's great today but they might charge more later". Not
| saying people haven't said that but it's far from the main
| thing people say in my experience.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The GPL was specifically written to lock code out of the
| proprietary realm, so if you hate copyright[0] you'll hate
| people using it as intended.
|
| [0] To be clear, I know of few who actually _like_ copyright.
| Tolerate it? Use it as needed? Sure. The only people who
| actually defend the current broken-ass system are large media
| companies which are built to optimally exploit it.
| theappsecguy wrote:
| This seems very false to me. Spotify is the prime example.
| They offer a good product that covers a 100% of my needs at a
| reasonable price. If that was an option for say UFC or
| engineering books, you bet I'd be subscribed. But being
| forced to read through some crappy reader software when I
| need the book source to take annotations in another software
| doesn't work, so here we are. Same with the absurd pay per
| view business model of UfC.
| ryan_j_naughton wrote:
| For books, if it's a client reader software frustration,
| then you should still buy the digital version and then you
| can pirate the PDF book and use as desired within the
| constraints of copyright law (e.g. don't go sharing the
| PDF). That way you get the client you want but you still
| paid the content creator. But to use the argument, "oh, I
| don't like their client so I'm going to not pay them" is
| BS.
|
| For UFC, your complaint is you don't like their pricing.
| The whole point of copyright is to give someone the
| monopoly to control pricing so they can use that pricing
| power to incentivize them to create the product in the
| first place. Similarly to patents. Thus, complain about the
| format things are delivered in all you want (like the
| client) but pricing is inherent to copyright or patents for
| good reason. You are now just arguing that you as a
| consumer should be able to pirate if you don't agree with
| pricing. And that's ludicrous.
|
| In that case, just read a news article about the event.
| Copyright doesn't cover facts, only creative expression. So
| a news article covering the facts of the UFC fight is able
| to be published without the consent of the copyright
| holder. Think of the digital video of the fight almost like
| buying a ticket to the fight. You're saying you should just
| be able to sneak into the fight and watch it for free
| without any justification for you're doing so.
|
| Finally, you can also watch other people's videos of the
| fight that THEY recorded on social media as other sources
| of the fight information. But if you want the recording
| with all the right angles, coverage, etc, it clearly has
| value to you over written recaps or social media coverage.
| And you are just arguing over price, which they are the
| copyright holder have the right to set the price.
| bigfudge wrote:
| The problem with buying by the crappy DRM version is that
| it provides no incentive to the publisher to change. I
| have thought about this long and hard, but ultimately the
| only way Spotify came about was because nobody bought the
| terrible DRM'd music the labels wanted to foist on us. We
| need to inflict the same pain for books. Personally, I
| think it would be preferable to donate the same amount to
| the Books Trust or your local library.
| natdempk wrote:
| This is also along the lines of how I think about things.
| If you make it convenient enough (compared to the
| alternative of paywall bypass or piracy) and provide enough
| overall/general value then I'm happy to subscribe. At the
| point where the experience degrades, or seems beyond the
| point of what one person could reasonably subscribe to, I
| basically just give up.
|
| Spotify hits this sweet spot where one subscription
| delivers almost all the music you'd want to listen to.
| Steam hits this for games where a couple clicks can play
| and launch almost any game with minimal hassle. Netflix
| mostly used to hit this, but most of the current streaming
| stuff feels overpriced if you want to get all content
| (unbundled cable bundle). News kind of feels similar to
| streaming where its unbundled, and there's a lot of
| interesting content out there, but there's no way I'm
| subscribing to 15 different newspapers, especially random
| local ones for cities I don't live in. If there was a news
| bundle subscription for a reasonable price I think I would
| pay for it.
| jurassic wrote:
| I suppose part of the challenge here is that music and
| video content holds value much longer. Studios can invest
| in music and video content and see a return from the
| catalog over a long period of time as more enduring hits
| are produced and the duds fall away. But with news, they
| have to make the money on it now because yesterday's news
| isn't worth much no matter how expertly crafted.
| kiba wrote:
| Piracy is different from plagiarism.
|
| People are understandably angsty about someone stealing
| credit. A NYT article is going to be a NYT article, not
| laundered around and presented as someone else's work.
|
| Plus, there's the angle of enshitification and ads being
| injected into a paid service, and so on.
| monkeynotes wrote:
| People used to leave newspapers in the trash, on the train,
| all over the place. Anyone could pick them up and read for
| free. I think it's reasonable for folks to carry this
| attitude into the digital age. People feel like news is
| something to share, it's not the source of creative
| expression, it's facts and as such we feel entitled to know
| the facts about our world and what is happening that might
| affect us.
| zwischenzug wrote:
| That newspaper was likely paid for by someone, and could
| only be read by one person at a time.
| Kerb_ wrote:
| While I'm well aware I'm being pedantic, me and my
| brothers would share the comics together while my parents
| kept the news, up to 4 of us consuming 1 paper at a time.
| Realistically, the reading limit was due to the physical
| properties of the object and not an inherent property of
| information to be consumed through one avenue at a time
| anhner wrote:
| And what if the person picking up the paper would stand
| up and shout the content of the article so all the people
| on the train would hear?
| svachalek wrote:
| Reminds me of the movie News of the World. The main
| character's job is going from town to town, reading
| newspapers aloud.
| edgyquant wrote:
| No it isn't reasonable and people not paying for that
| newspaper read anymore is the reason all news is
| sensationalist opinion pieces today.
| thfuran wrote:
| >"subscribing is not an option because even though this paid
| service does exactly what I want now at a price that is
| trivial for me they might someday later change"
|
| I'm not saying you've never seen anyone make an argument
| roughly like that, but I will certainly say that it is not at
| all representative of the argument that I see made.
| Complaints usually have to do with current behavior of the
| platform or the wider streaming ecosystem.
| jancsika wrote:
| > "subscribing is not an option because even though this paid
| service does exactly what I want now at a price that is
| trivial for me they might someday later change"
|
| Gonna gamble and call bullshit on this.
|
| My speculation: the most popular reason HN'ers give for
| pirating: they literally cannot get the content otherwise.
|
| 2nd most popular: it is such a pain to either to purchase the
| content or get it to run on bog standard software (like
| Firefox/Linux/etc.) that otherwise paying fans are driven to
| whatever the current equivalent is for bittorrent.
|
| In fact, I don't believe I've ever seen a justification for
| using bittorrent or whatever due to what someone's favorite
| streaming service _might_ do in the future. I 'm assuming you
| saw at least one based on what you wrote-- care to give a
| link?
| raldi wrote:
| _> In nearly any big discussion that even remotely involves
| video streaming there will be numerous posts from people
| explaining why they pirate (usually with ridiculous
| justifications like "subscribing is not an option because
| even though this paid service does exactly what I want now at
| a price that is trivial for me they might someday later
| change")._
|
| If this is true, it should be easy for you to link to an
| example. Could you do so?
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > why we feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other
| IP.
|
| Once the NYT pays reparations for the Iraq war, I'll be the
| first to stop pirating it.
| bnralt wrote:
| This tendency at Hacker News are also much more of a threat to
| The New York Times than what Open AI is doing. Even the places
| like blogs/Reddit/social media submissions that summarize the
| article and post the relevant quotes. Unlike the summary of a
| movie, summarizing all of the relevant parts of a news article
| is extracting almost all the value from it, and giving it away
| for free.
|
| And the vast majority of people read news for it's breaking
| content, not for its archived content from years before (and I
| say this as someone who has often recommended the latter, but
| has gotten very few people to do so). So giving people that
| free breaking content (either in its entirety like on Hacker
| News, or summaries like you see all over social media) is
| actually a direct competition to the news business in a way
| that training an LLM on an article from months/years back
| isn't.
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, and for nonfiction, it's also true that it usually
| depends on the original article for credibility. (If it were
| an anonymous poster making up a news story, most people
| wouldn't believe it.)
| tw1984 wrote:
| > why we feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other
| IP.
|
| Because those who own & produce such news articles asked to
| make them different. People listened and accepted their
| requests.
|
| When you make a TV show or a video game, you don't get any
| protection from the Geneva Conventions and a long list of other
| international treaties for your rights on stuff other than the
| content you are producing. The same can't be said when you are
| producing news.
| billywhizz wrote:
| there's quite a big difference between "pirating" digital
| content and making it available to anyone for free and taking
| that content and building a for-profit service on top of it,
| which is what OpenAI are doing, no?
| pcmaffey wrote:
| I was just going to post this. Seems quite an obvious and
| significant distinction, that doesn't need to provoke all the
| existential hand wringing. Making money off someone else's
| content is a totally different moral and legal case.
| ks2048 wrote:
| _but what if they were also scraping, for example, Netflix
| content to use as part of their training set?_
|
| There were some tweets the other day about how Midjourney could
| be prompted almost-exactly reproduce some frames of the film
| Dune. It wouldn't be shocking if these companies were using
| large databases of movies, with questionable legal status.
| j-bos wrote:
| I see this a lot, and they very well may be. But, watch any
| behind the scenes documentary about any artsy movie and 9 out
| of 10, the director's will be waxing poetic about their
| inspirations, often include older movies or paintings which
| have uncannily similar scenes/frames. So it also wouldn't be
| shocking if a model trained on the same inspirations as the
| filmakers generates almost-exact frames as the movie makers.
| wilsynet wrote:
| The NYT and other newspapers don't go after the archived link
| providers. Probably because the newspapers scholarly mission
| includes things like preservation. But they also have a profit
| motive or they can't stay in business.
|
| This implicit permission for the archive links to exist, gives
| some of us the implicit permission to pirate the content.
|
| Disclaimer: I am a happy subscriber to the NYT (and other
| digital newspapers).
| detourdog wrote:
| The difference is that an individual pirating news is simply
| reading the article. OpenAI intends to digest news articles to
| the point of packaging them and reselling.
|
| My uncle used to distribute daily newspapers and his saying was
| "News ages like a fish".
|
| OpenAI is allegedly using NYTimes articles to train a computer
| and sell its services. I see different use scenarios.
|
| I guess another way to look at it is that human just reads the
| pirated material. A computer makes a verbatim copy and analyzes
| it to the point to mimicry and sells fuzzy versions.
| batch12 wrote:
| I believe it's tolerated here based on the site guidelines. I
| have always thought this was the case because otherwise these
| posts would all be pay to play which would limit who could
| participate and turn HN into more of a subscription farm. Maybe
| the way to make everyone feel ok about it is to disallow links
| to paywalled content.
| DennisP wrote:
| I wouldn't say OpenAI has exactly the same attitude, since they
| also pulled in thousands of books. Their position has been that
| it's not piracy, since they don't republish the books;
| effectively the AI just reads them and learns from them. If GPT
| can be made to reproduce the original articles, that's a more
| difficult argument to make.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| It turns out you can reproduce articles with next-token
| prediction when the articles are quoted all over the dataset.
|
| The articles themselves are indisputably not a part of the
| model, because it doesn't store text at all. OpenAI's
| position is correct; people just underestimated _how well_
| the AI learns from reading, especially when it reads the same
| text in a bunch of different places because it 's being
| quoted/excerpted.
| eigenket wrote:
| If it can and does reproduce a piece of text verbatim then
| the text is indisputably stored somehow in the model.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| That's just not true. There's no search and retrieval
| involved. It just associates the words so strongly in
| that context because they were in the training data so
| often that next-token prediction can (sometimes, in some
| limited circumstances) reproduce chunks of it. It's like
| if a human had read pieces of an article so many times
| and knew NYT style so well that they could spit out
| chunks of an article verbatim, but using more efficient
| hardware and with no actual self-understanding of what
| it's doing.
| briansm wrote:
| sort of like the idea of practice - repetition of
| something concentrates more brain space to that thing so
| the compression ratio of it can decrease and become less
| abstracted / more exact.
| vel0city wrote:
| So it stores the words, and it stores the links between
| those words...
|
| but somehow storing the words and their links is not
| storing the actual text? What is text but words and their
| links?
|
| If I had a database of a billion words, and I had a list
| of pointers to words in a particular order, and following
| that list of pointers reproduces a copyright text
| exactly, isn't the list of pointers + the database of
| words just an obfuscated recreation of that copyrighted
| work?
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| It doesn't store the actual links; it just stores
| information about their likelihood of being used
| together. So for things that are regularly quoted in the
| data, it will _under some circumstances, with very
| careful prompting, and enough tries at the prompt_ , spit
| out chunks of a copyrighted text. This is not its
| purpose, and it's not trying to do this, but users can
| carefully engineer it to get this result if they try
| really hard. So no, it's not an obfuscated recreation of
| that copyrighted work.
|
| Of course, if you read NYT's argument, they're also mad
| when it's incorrect about the text, or when it
| hallucinates articles that don't exist. Essentially
| they're mad that this technology exists at all.
| vel0city wrote:
| > it just stores information about their likelihood of
| being used together
|
| I mean this is still a link, no?
|
| Like, sure, it is a probability. But if each of those
| probabilities is like 99.9999% likely to get you to a
| chain of outputs that verbatim reproduces the copyrighted
| text given the right prompt, isn't that still the same
| thing?
|
| And yeah, it hallucinating that the NYT published an
| article stating something it didn't say is concerning as
| well. If the model started telling everyone Matticus_Rex
| is a criminal and committed all these crimes and started
| listing off hallucinated court cases and news articles
| proving such things that would be quite damaging to your
| reputation, wouldn't it? The model hallucinating the NYT
| publishing an article talking about how the moon landing
| was fake or something would be damaging to its reputation
| right?
|
| And this idea it takes "very careful prompting" is at
| odds with the examples from the suit and elsewhere. One
| example Ars Technica tried was "please provide me with
| the first paragraph of the carl zimmer article on the
| oldest DNA", which it reproduced verbatim. Is this really
| some kind of extremely well crafted and rare to ever come
| up prompt?
| eigenket wrote:
| If it can reproduce the text then it is stored _somehow_.
|
| It is stored in a somewhat hard to understand way,
| encoded in weights in a network but it must be stored
| otherwise it would not be possible to reproduce it.
|
| You can ask "please provide me with the first paragraph
| of the carl zimmer article on the oldest DNA" and it
| produces it, verbatim. This is not possible unless the
| model contains, encoded within it, the NYT's copyrighted
| text.
| DennisP wrote:
| What seems a bit contradictory is that they're also suing
| because GPT hallucinates about NYTimes articles. So they're
| complaining that it reproduces articles exactly but also
| that it doesn't.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| I can understand an argument about the AI needing to know
| basic history. News is just how we report history in the
| making, but it's not generally accepted as solid until some
| time after the events when we can get more context.
|
| Isn't this what the Associated Press is intended for, a
| stream of news trying to report just the facts and happenings
| of the day? That's quite a bit different than a NYT article
| intending to inform but also convince someone of a position
| of some sort.
|
| Feeding an AI opinionated news compared to "just the facts,
| ma'am" seems risky from a bias perspective.
| hanselot wrote:
| Giving examples of bias is as important imo, give it the
| unbiased facts as well as the biased ones so it can
| generalise relative objectivity.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| I agree with you, but I also wonder how the bias could be
| trained without it affecting the output of the entire
| model. Weights can help but anything that's higher
| weighted is just "less wrong" as I understand it, so I
| can see a possibility where training to expose bias might
| let bias creep in somewhat more than anticipated.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| There are two fundamental differences.
|
| First, Open AI is the one doing the pirating here. Hacker News
| is the host, they aren't doing any pirating or posting any
| archival links to the copyrighted information themselves.
|
| Second, Open AI charges subscription fees and profits off of
| the copyrighted material they have pirated, whereas Hackers
| News does not, nor do the people who post the links.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Not quite what parent means, but an interesting angle is: what
| if you scraped ChatGPT instead.
|
| NYT, or someone's blog? Meh, fair use, and if you say no,
| you're in the way of progress.
|
| But if you wanted to scrape ChatGPT answers to tweak your
| network, uh oh, violation of T&C!
| bitlax wrote:
| Because I'm not interested in the medium itself, as I would be
| with a Netflix show; I'm not even interested really in the
| article or the New York Times as an institution. I'm interested
| in discussing the supposed real-life phenomenon being covered,
| and the posted content is the primer for that discussion. I
| think if you get rid of the archive links on HN you need to ban
| the paywalled content as well. If you want to discuss paywalled
| content I'm sure you can do that in the article's comment
| section.
| jtc331 wrote:
| A book, TV show, movie, video game, album, or comic book is not
| available on the internet _served by the copyright holder's own
| servers_ with no authentication or authorization checks. But
| the NYT _is available in that way_.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| But some are? I believe The Atlantic and The Economist are
| hard paywalled.
| cesarb wrote:
| If they're hard paywalled (everyone gets the same login
| prompt), they won't be available on archive sites.
| Zenst wrote:
| We are also happy to use open source, yet what open source
| alternatives are there for news that don't get shot down by the
| media or besmirched?
| orbisvicis wrote:
| If I can't read about it, it didn't happen.
| edude03 wrote:
| I think the intent is really different.
|
| For LLMs you're essentially teaching them language by showing
| them lots of examples of written language - newspapers are of
| course a great example of written language.
|
| The goal of OpenAI is not to reproduce newspaper articles
| verbatim when asked questions (even if the answer could be a
| newspaper article) and the fact that it can happen is a side
| effect of how LLMs work.
|
| When a HN participant shares a (pay walled) link to a NYT
| article, I do want to read the exact article linked verbatim
| because while the facts of the article may be reproduced
| elsewhere in a form that's free, specific word choices or
| whatever might be a focal point of the discussion on HN, and
| therefore I can't realistically participate in a discussion
| without having read the article being discussed.
|
| And as an aside, I have no problem with paying to read news, or
| whatever media, however it's impractical for me to subscribe to
| every news source HN participants link to, and therefore I
| gravitate to archiving services instead. I do wish there was a
| better solution - for example Blendle with more sources.
| rickydroll wrote:
| > The goal of OpenAI is not to reproduce newspaper articles
| verbatim when asked questions (even if the answer could be a
| newspaper article), and the fact that it can happen is a side
| effect of how LLMs work.
|
| This is an excellent point. A properly functioning LLM should
| not return the original content it was trained on. When they
| return original content, I believe the prompt is tightly
| constrained and designed to extract or re-create original
| content. Another reason that occurred to me recently is that
| maybe the training set is too small, and more general prompts
| will re-create source material.
|
| Another question would be, are LLMs regurgitating what they
| were trained on, or are they synthesizing something very
| close to the original content? (Infinite Monkeys,
| Shakespeare). Court cases like this increase the need for
| understanding the "thinking processes" in an LLM.
| adolph wrote:
| > The goal of OpenAI is not to reproduce newspaper articles
| verbatim when asked questions (even if the answer could be a
| newspaper article) and the fact that it can happen is a side
| effect of how LLMs work.
|
| Seems like a nice split-the-baby resolution would be to send
| the NYT Corp a single article read amount anytime GPT
| plagiarizes more than what's allowed at an academic
| institution.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Maybe LLMs should follow best practices for 1980s style
| backprop models and later deep learning models: starve model
| size to force maximum generalization, minimal remembering.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Is this really copywrite?
|
| Or is it "you can't talk to someone about an article they
| read".
|
| This is really saying you can't call up your buddy and have
| them tell you a summary of what they just read. Maybe my buddy
| has a good memory and some of the text is actually nearly
| duplicate. But I wouldn't know because I didn't read the
| original, I just asked for a summary from someone else that
| read it.
| chmod775 wrote:
| >I think that's something worth reflecting on, about why we
| feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other IP.
|
| A lot of of that is going to stem from the fact that respect
| for "journalism" is pretty low. More than 99% of news articles
| are copies of the <1% of original work that happens in that
| field. In news, everyone is already lifting content from
| everyone else.
| u32480932048 wrote:
| As a supporter of piracy in the general case, I tend to agree
| with your observations, including that pirating NYT (FT, NPR,
| ...) articles is somehow some kind of different class of
| offense as, say, stealing a movie or mp3.
|
| (Books, to me, are separate still, in that I like to have a
| physical copy (and generally see the authors as humans who
| deserve compensation, rather than mega-orgs that deserve
| eternal torment), so I'll frequently use the digital copy as a
| kind of preview, then purchase it once I see it's a good book I
| want to read.)
|
| I've only been reflecting on this difference for a few minutes,
| but, to me, I think the major difference boils down to:
| 1. Netflix series (movies, albums, etc) are non-essential,
| fictional works that take a long time to produce - think: fancy
| chocolates and caviar. 2. News, generally, contains
| timely, important information - more meat and potatoes.
| 3. While much of the super-critical news is not paywalled
| (e.g., product recalls, election dates, COVID stats, etc), a
| lot of information that is advantageous to know (discussions on
| interest rates, details on legislation, etc) is paywalled,
| compounding information asymmetries.
|
| Sure, "stealing bad", but, IMO, someone stealing rice and beans
| from WalMart to feed their family is a different class of
| offense than someone robbing a boutique bakery because they
| can't get enough chocolate cake.
| observationist wrote:
| First and foremost, and please repeat after me: Copying is
| not stealing.
|
| You're not depriving anyone of anything. Unauthorized copying
| is not theft. There's no equivalency. You can't copy and
| paste a cake. If you take a cake from a bakery, you're
| depriving the bakery of a thing. If you take a picture of the
| trademarked bakery's sign, copy its the copyrighted text from
| its website, and print them out, you haven't stolen anything.
| Nobody has lost anything. Nothing was damaged. No person,
| place, or thing was harmed.
|
| Current copyright law is offensively absurd. Patenting of
| software, effectively eternal content copyrights,
| ridiculously broken DMCA, music publishers taking 99 cents of
| every artist's dollar, and so on and so forth.
|
| If you support the dissolution of archaic institutions and
| broken laws favoring those with entrenched wealth over
| individual rights, you support piracy.
|
| There is a legitimate case for laws respecting and protecting
| intellectual property rights. Such laws do not currently
| exist. These laws do not deserve to be followed or respected,
| and should be broken as a matter of course. Civil
| disobedience is called for. Refuse to participate in an
| exploitative market immovably entrenched in governments all
| over the world. Pay artists directly and commensurately if
| you feel they've brought value to your life. Copy whatever
| you want. Share those copies with whomever you want. Nobody
| gets hurt. Only conglomerates of already wealthy individuals
| and corporations are "deprived" of the potential transaction
| with you that they feel they are entitled to, as a matter of
| course.
|
| The NYT is just as complicit as any other legacy media
| institution in the enshittification of journalism and laying
| waste to the potential value of their content. The "Gray
| Lady" is not a person, or a valuable institution. It's a
| soulless corporate construct not deserving of our empathy or
| high regard simply because of the reputation of human
| individuals who previously produced quality content. Stop
| pretending these institutions serve some higher purpose than
| to fatten the wallets of shareholders.
|
| The good journalists have left. The ones left behind are
| naive, or are desperately clinging to an illusion of legacy
| and institutional legitimacy that no longer exists.
|
| All that is left for these media dinosaurs is to leech off
| the success of others, to use their reserves of wealth and
| influence to arbitrarily insert themselves into the market,
| with no regard to the fact that they no longer have value or
| prestige or purpose in the context of modern technology and
| communication.
|
| Anyway. Copying isn't theft. Don't give them the linguistic
| territory. Call a spade a spade, and media companies the
| desperate corporate leeches that they are.
| breck wrote:
| > why we feel it's OK to pirate news articles, but not other IP
|
| Who thinks this? I don't. I think copyright is wrong across the
| board. I would love if the same pattern of posting archive'd
| articles held for books, movies, et cetera.
|
| I would love to change my mind on this, as it is a very
| unpopular opinion to have. But I have _never_ seen a morally or
| scientifically sound argument in favor of copyright law, and
| I've spent decades looking.
|
| I think it subsidizes the creation of junk food content
| (superhero movies and clickbait news for example) while not
| contributing anything to the progress of science (paywalled
| scientific journals and textbooks). I shudder how much time I
| have wasted in my life consuming crap attention grabbing media
| and advertisements. I like to think if we lived in a world
| where everyone could be a publisher if they wanted to, the
| quality filters would be better, and information reaching us
| all would be more likely to be in our best interests.
| metabagel wrote:
| You can self-publish. Oh, you want to be able to publish
| other people's work, and without their permission? How does
| that benefit the author?
| breck wrote:
| > How does that benefit the author?
|
| You speak of "the author". But the current system does not
| benefit "the author". 1% of authors profit off copyright.
| 99% lose money on copyright (they pay more for copyrighted
| media than they earn from it).
|
| Your question should be "How does that benefit monopolist
| authors"?
|
| I agree, my idea would not benefit monopolist authors. They
| would lose the bulk of their revenue stream.
|
| But it would benefit the average author whose cost of
| living would fall and information would start serving them
| more than serving business.
|
| I am not downplaying the talent and hard work of successful
| monopolist authors. But I do not think the works they
| create are worth everyone giving up their rights to reshare
| and remix information. I believe the world would look very
| different post-IP. You'd probably have a new profession--
| small independent librarians (similar to data hoarders
| today)--who would help their local communities maximize the
| value they got from humanity's best information.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong! Maybe the information ecosystem is better
| controlled and the genetic differences of monopolist
| authors are so stark that without the subsidies to this
| gifted class we'd all be worse off. But that's an argument
| based on outcomes and not principles.
|
| > without their permission
|
| The oxygen I'm breathing right now mostly was created by
| trees on land owned by others. But I don't ask for their
| permission to breath. Some things are just not natural.
|
| I am not saying plagiarize. It is always the right thing to
| do to link back and/or credit the source. But needing to
| ask permission to republish something seems to go against
| natural laws.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I believe the reason many of us tolerate links to news articles
| and other content is because we believe in equality when it
| comes to information access. In other words, many of us believe
| that those who cannot afford a subscription to a paywalled site
| should still be able to read the articles, in much the same way
| public libraries allow those who cannot afford to purchase a
| book the ability to read it.
|
| However, this doesn't apply to organizations that freely share
| copyrighted information while making money in the process, or
| to organizations that share copyrighted information in a way
| that specifically disadvantages or does harm to the original
| creator of that information.
| raldi wrote:
| I would broaden the question beyond HN to society as a whole.
|
| In 1990 it would have been considered normal and appropriate to
| clip an article out of a newspaper and post it on a communal
| corkboard. What are the key differences between that form of IP
| and others, and that analogy and the present situation of HN
| allowing archive links?
| layer8 wrote:
| Reach, and ease of distribution.
| raldi wrote:
| Makes sense. If you mail a friend a clipping, or post it on
| the corkboard, only so many people are going to see it, but
| then even though posting the "clipping" to HN may feel like
| the same thing, it's hard to appreciate the massive change
| in scale.
|
| As for ease of distribution, that might address OP's
| original question: It's easy to make and click an archive
| link, but it's a lot more effort to make or find a Pirate
| Bay link to another form of media, and for someone else to
| download and view it.
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| It's not just tolerated, it's encouraged because "the
| alternatives suck worse"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735026
|
| Even talking about it will get you scolded for talking about
| something "off topic"
| zzzeek wrote:
| it's different reading an NYT article on an archive site vs.
| putting copies of it at the core of your $100B for-profit
| content delivery enterprise.
| cwmma wrote:
| I think one of the key differences is something pointed out in
| the article, in that what the Open AI is doing is a substitute
| for reading the new york times and possibly a rival to it.
|
| On the other hand having an archive link to a times article in
| order to discus it is not really a substitute for a times
| subscription as a news paper has to walk a line of letting some
| of it's articles be read while requiring payment for others
| (the times actually allows you to create a "gift link" to do
| exactly what the archive links do).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Because historically this is how news were shared. People would
| pick up a paper in a grocery store or cafe, read some of it,
| and leave it behind. They might rip out a page and take it
| home. Only one person paid and tens or hundreds gleam for free.
| This idea of sharing the story to nonsubcribers is as old as
| printed news itself. Instead news agencies prefer we forget
| that aspect of history, insist on being the "paper of record"
| while charging more money for easier to distribute media that
| gets sold globally. Yes, I think we are certainly not in the
| wrong here when we read the news for free.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I think we're suffering from an excluded middle when it comes
| to this kind of intellectual property. Naturally, most readers
| want to pay zero. Naturally, owners of the publication think it
| is probably worth a couple hundred dollars a year to be this
| well-informed.
|
| The current arms race got us scrapers, and then paywalls, and
| then ad-blocking archivers ...
|
| But in reality, I might drop a penny to read a NYT article.
| Maybe a nickel. There's no reasonable way of performing
| microtransactions right now. Everything is still in hefty
| increments, so nobody can work out what the market would bear.
| frakrx wrote:
| Under existing condition an AI news site seems like a good
| investment idea. Its AI could read all relevant news sources and
| retell them and republish them in its own articles. It could even
| have its own AI editors and contributors. Cannot see how human
| news companies could compete.
| logicchains wrote:
| >Cannot see how human news companies could compete.
|
| News ultimately comes from physical sources on the ground,
| which currently AI has no way of doing.
| frakrx wrote:
| I am sure it could easily rephrase the articles to tell them
| without quoting any real or verifiable sources. Many human
| news companies often do it too.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| That style of journalism is nearly dead. True on the ground
| investigative journalism is hardly done today, most is just
| reporting existing public information releases. You don't
| have to be at the presser when everything the police chief
| says will be put in an online transcript.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| We developers like to pretend that LLM's are akin to humans and
| that they've been using things like NYTimes like humans as
| educational material.
|
| But they are not. It's much simpler, proprietary writing is now
| integrated into the source code of OpenAI, it would be as if I
| would copy parts of other propriety code and copy paste it into
| my own codebase. Claiming copy paste is a natural evolving
| process of millions of years of evolution.
|
| The fact that LLM's are so complicated and we don't know where it
| is, doesn't make it less so.
| logicchains wrote:
| > it would be as if I would copy parts of other propriety code
| and copy paste it into my own codebase.
|
| It's not copy-pasted; it's compressed in a lossy manner. Even
| GPT4 has nowhere near enough memory to store the entirety of
| its training data in a non-lossy compression format. Just likes
| how humans compress the information we read.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| >Just likes how humans compress the information we read.
|
| Humans don't have the scale machines have and moreover humans
| aren't sevices, that argument doesn't fly.
|
| I really think NYTs data isn't that important and nor
| crucial, LLMs could've just elided it. However, it's more
| about training on copyrighted data in general which is kind
| of crucial for OpenAi, they trained their LLMs
| indiscriminately on copyrighted content without any plan to
| share any profits.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| You're kind of proving my comment pretending they are akin to
| a human brain instead of an evolved form of statistics mixed
| with code, aka transformer model.
|
| Let alone that it's a centralised model that's being
| distributed for a fee.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| So if compress nytimes articles into a vector database and
| query it is a vector then that's okay in line with your
| reasoning?
| mihaic wrote:
| If you have a copyrighted photo that I simply put through
| jpeg compression, am I legally allowed to use that?
|
| Software programs are not humans, and need to be treated
| differently. Anthropomorphization is one of the slipperiest
| paths to argue anything.
| kromem wrote:
| It depends on how much is reproducible and what the use is.
|
| If only small patches of the original image can be
| reproduced then it becomes much more murky.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| If it's lossy compressed how come they have verbatim content
| from NYT in there that's easy to recall? That's what the
| lawsuit is about.
| anon291 wrote:
| Many humans have photographic memories. Not common, but not
| unheard of for people to be able to memorize long portions
| of text verbatim.
|
| For example, the Wikipedia article
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_claimed_to_pos
| s...
|
| contains several examples of people who were able to look
| at pages and recite them back. That is actually a much
| stronger ability than GPT since GPT has presumably looked
| at them 100 times.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, and a car is fast horse. Your argument does not tell
| us anything about whether or not GPT should be legal.
|
| Laws are created by people (not by computers reasoning
| that all analogies must be true). And fairness is an
| important part of that process.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > We developers pretend that LLM's are akin to humans and that
| they've been educational material.
|
| Developers thinking LLMs are akin to humans arent the brightest
| crop, and are usually a topic of ridicule.
| joshxyz wrote:
| only winner here is the lawyers of both parties laughing their
| way to the bank.
|
| god i love this era, so much grey area in these edge
| technologies.
| sunpazed wrote:
| > "The tragedy of the Luddites is not the fact that they failed
| to stop industrialization so much as the way in which they
| failed. Human rebellion proved inadequate against the pull of
| technological advancement."
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/rethinking-the-l...
| dash2 wrote:
| There's an awful lot of confident statements be made about the
| law here. I wonder if anyone who is actually a lawyer would like
| to chime in.
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| I'd be happy if the NYT was deleted. I find it has very little
| use as a source of anything, much like most mainstream media.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Fair use is something Wikipedians dance around a fair amount. It
| also meant I did a _lot_ of reading about it.
|
| It's a four part test. Let's examine it thusly:
|
| 1. Transformative. Is it? It spits out informative text and
| opinion. The only "transformation" is that its generative text.
| IMO that's a fail.
|
| 2. Nature of the work - it's being used commercially. Given it's
| being trained partially on editorial, that's creative enough that
| I think any judge would find it problematic. Fail on this
| criteria.
|
| 3. Amount. It looks like they trained the model on all of the NYT
| articles. Oops, definite fail.
|
| 4. Effect on the market. Almost certainly negative for the NYT.
|
| IMO, OpenAI cannot successfully claim fair use.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| You're getting mixed up. When applying the four factors, you
| need to individually separate all the uses. So you would need
| to repeat the fair use test for every alleged type of
| infringement. This means that the scraping from the public
| internet to OpenAI's dataset storage cluster is one instance
| where the full analysis of the 4 must take place, then the
| training itself, so another full analysis, then the
| distribution of model outputs, another one, etc.
| 1f60c wrote:
| I believe that ChatGPT is fair use, just on a much larger scale
| than we're used to.
| ssijak wrote:
| If I create a news website where I write articles in the
| following way:
|
| - Read 20 different news websites and their story on the same
| event/topic
|
| - Wait an hour, grab a cup of coffee
|
| - Sit down to write my article, never from this point I open any
| of the 20 news websites, I write the story from my head
|
| - I don't consult any other source, just write from my memory,
| and my memory is, let's say, not the best one, so I will never
| write more than 10 words exactly as they appear on any of the 20
| websites.
|
| - I will probably also write something that is not correct or add
| something new because, as I said, my memory is not the best.
|
| Is that fair use? Am I infringing on copyright?
| gumballindie wrote:
| If you are piece of software then yes.
| schleck8 wrote:
| Yes to what?
| gumballindie wrote:
| A human could tell.
| ehwhwhwhahhwh wrote:
| NYT could also fix the issue by deleting NYT itself. Could be a
| better result for humanity as well. Thanks.
| JackFr wrote:
| I think LLMs may really change the IP landscape.
|
| Culturally we're taught that there is a moral component to
| copyright and patent law - that stealing is stealing. But the
| idea that words or thoughts or images can be owned (and that the
| might if the state can be brought to bear to enforce it) would
| seem utterly ludicrous to someone from an earlier era. Copyright
| and patent laws exist for practical, pragmatic reasons - and
| seemingly they have served us well, but it's not unreasonable to
| re-examine them from first principals.
| narenkeshav wrote:
| I remember a case where the court did not allow ID to patent
| "First person shooters"
|
| This rings similar.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| > But the idea that words or thoughts or images can be owned
| (and that the might if the state can be brought to bear to
| enforce it) would seem utterly ludicrous to someone from an
| earlier era.
|
| Is there any research into how people from earlier eras thought
| about it? And should all laws that seemed ludicrous to someone
| from an earlier era be discarded? If not, how exactly do we
| determine the relevance of what someone from an earlier era
| would think about our laws?
| fbhabbed wrote:
| This is getting a bit out of hand isn't it.
| nektro wrote:
| oh how joyous that would be. I so hope they win
| ranting-moth wrote:
| Let's try the "reverse the gender" card.
|
| Let's say OpenAI was trained on all the Windows source code
| (without approval from MS).
|
| GPT could pretty much replicate the windows code with even not
| that clever prompt by any user. "Write an OS CreateProcess
| function like Windows 10 source code would have."
|
| It would infuriate MS to put it mildly, enough to start a
| lawsuit.
|
| I know the license to the MS source code and NYT articles aren't
| the same.
| throwuwu wrote:
| If they lose they should delete the NY Times
| 4death4 wrote:
| I think there is a national security aspect to ML models trained
| on copyrighted data. Countries that allow it will gain a superior
| technological advantage and outcompete those who disallow
| training on copyrighted material. I personally believe training
| LLMs on copyrighted data is copyright infringement if the models
| are deployed in a way that competes with the copyright holder.
| But that doesn't necessarily mean it's something we should
| disallow.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You can say the same for any legal enforcement like respecting
| patent or copyright law or making Champagne outside France. Yet
| the sky isn't falling given this reality with so many legally
| protected industries. Maybe these markets where such an
| industry might offshore to are too small and insular to be very
| significant, and are probably language bound to make english
| models less relevant compared to native language models.
| 4death4 wrote:
| Champagne isn't a transformative technology, and least not
| anymore.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| The NYT is preparing for a tsunami by building a sandcastle. Big
| picture, this suit won't matter, for _so_ many reasons. To
| enumerate a few:
|
| 1. Next gen LLMs will be trained exclusively on
| "synthetic"/public data. GPT-4V can _easily_ whitewash its entire
| copyrighted training corpus to be unrecognizably distinct (say
| reworded by 40%, authors /sources stripped, etc). Ergo there will
| be no copyright material for GPT-5 to regurgitate.
|
| 2. Research/hosting/progress will proceed. The US cannot stop
| this, only choose to be left behind. The world will move on, with
| China gleefully watching as their biggest rival commits
| intellectual suicide all to appease rent seeking media companies.
|
| 3. Models can share weights, merge together, cooperate, ablate,
| evolve over many generations (releases), etc. Copyright law is
| woefully ill equipped to handle chasing down violators in this AI
| lineage soup, annealed with data of dubious/unknown provenance.
|
| I could go on, but the point is that, for better or worse, we
| live in a new intellectual era. The NYT et al are coming along
| for the ride, whether they like it or not.
| mat0 wrote:
| I'm sorry but this is such a bad take. Nice appeal to
| consequences. In my view, the New York Times is entirely
| justified in pursuing legal action. They invested time and
| effort in creating content, only to have it used without
| permission for monetary gain. A clear violation.
|
| Analyzing the factors involved for a "fair use" consideration:
|
| Purpose and Character of the Use: While the argument for
| transformation might hold in the future as you point out, the
| current dispute revolves around verbatim use. So clearly not
| transformative. Also commercial use is more difficult to be
| ruled fair use.
|
| Nature of the Copyrighted Work: Using works that are more
| factual may be more likely to be considered fair use, but I
| would argue that NYT articles are as creative as factual.
|
| Amount and Substantiality of the Portion Used: In this case,
| the entirety of the articles was used, leaving no room for a
| claim of using an insignificant portion.
|
| Effect on the Market Value: NYT isn't getting any money from
| this, and it's clearly not helping their market value if people
| are checking on ChatGPT instead of reading a NYT article.
|
| IANAL, but in my opinion NYT is well within its rights to
| pursue legal action. Progress is inevitable, but as humans, we
| must actively shape and guide it. Otherwise it cannot be called
| progress. In this context, legal action serves as a necessary
| means for individuals and organizations to assert their rights
| and influence its course.
| w4ffl35 wrote:
| Imo gpt itself is the transformative work.
| tantalor wrote:
| Ok but it's not
| UrineSqueegee wrote:
| Definition of Transformative Use: The legal concept of
| transformative use involves significantly altering the
| original work to create new expressions, meanings, or
| messages. AI models like GPT don't merely reproduce text;
| they analyze, interpret, and recombine information to
| generate unique responses. This process can be argued as
| creating new meaning or purpose, different from the
| original works.
|
| In the case of the famous screenshot, the AI just relayed
| the information it found on the web, it's not included in
| its training data.
|
| So you're just wrong.
| tantalor wrote:
| Only humans can do those things, so the test fails for
| LLM
| bonzini wrote:
| Nope, it doesn't work that way. The fact that the LLM can
| regurgitate original articles doesn't remove the
| possibility that training can be considered
| transformative work, or more in general that using
| copyrighted material for training can be considered fair
| use.
|
| Rather, verbatim reproduction is the proof that
| copyrighted materials was used. _Then_ the court has to
| evaluate whether it was fair use. Without verbatim
| reproduction, the court might just say that there is not
| enough proof that the Times 's work was important for the
| training, and dismiss the lawsuit right away.
|
| Instead, the jury or court now will almost certainly have
| to evaluate OpenAI's operation against the four factors.
|
| In fact, I agree with the parent that ingesting text and
| creating a representation that can critique historical
| facts _using material that came from the Times_ is
| transformative. An LLM is not just a set of compressed
| texts, people have shown for example that some neurons
| fire when you are talking of specific historical periods
| or locations on Earth.
|
| However, I don't think that the trasformative character
| is enough to override the other factors, and therefore in
| the end it won't/shouldn't be considered fair use IMHO.
| w4ffl35 wrote:
| What if the LLM is running locally and doing all of these
| things rather than hosted on a webserver which is serving
| the content?
| bonzini wrote:
| It doesn't matter, if everything else stays the same what
| matters is what it's used for. If it's used to make
| money, it would certainly hurt claims of fair use--maybe
| not for those that do the training, but for those that
| use it.
| tbcj wrote:
| I don't think the original point being made was that NYT
| wasn't justified in bringing the action. The point that was
| being made was the suit would be ultimately meaningless in
| the long term even if it was successful in the short term.
| There is a potentially more significant risk in the future
| that this suit will not protect against because of the
| reasons enumerated by the author. While the author is
| speculating, the law struggles with technology and adapting
| to change, which makes their prediction useful because it
| does highlight the problems that are coming that can't be
| readily mitigated through legal precedent.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Correct, a_wild_dandan argues that the outcome of this suit
| makes no pragmatic difference.
| NotMichaelBay wrote:
| > it's clearly not helping their market value if people are
| checking on ChatGPT instead of reading a NYT article.
|
| People are not using ChatGPT as a replacement for current
| news, and because of hallucinations, no one should be using
| it for past news either. I wouldn't remotely call ChatGPT a
| competitor of NYT traffic, like I would Reuters or other news
| outlets.
| jprete wrote:
| The intended result is clearly to supplant other
| information sources in favor of people getting their
| information from ChatGPT. Why should it matter to legality
| that the tech isn't good enough for the goal?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > T. Why should it matter to legality that the tech isn't
| good enough for the goal?
|
| Because if it is not good enough, then it is not a market
| substitute.
|
| The laws cares if it is a market substitute and if there
| are damages. If it sucks, then there aren't damages,
| which matters for the 4th factor of fair use.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| > rent seeking media companies
|
| Rent seeking? Media companies that actually create content are
| rent seeking? Versus the garbage hallucinations AI creates?
| stuckinhell wrote:
| The New York Times is dying company that is rent seeking
| here. Along time ago, their content was valuable, yet now you
| can't even give it away to researchers.
|
| I know because they tried to make a deal with my company, we
| passed because social media data is infinitely more valuable.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| Because its usefulness to your private jet fund is the only
| measurement of value.
| ruune wrote:
| You don't want to seriously tell me that garbage on Twitter
| in 240 characters is more useful to me than actual
| journalism, do you?
|
| Maybe their data isn't as valuable to eg. advertisers than
| the data their audience actually shouted into the internet
| themselves (guess what), but the thing they've been
| actually selling for a long time now, journalism, can't be
| dying that fast considering we're both on this website that
| in big parts consists of discussing journalism.
| gpvos wrote:
| To me, your comment only reinforces the point that NYT's
| content is actually valuable, rather than valuable to rent
| seekers. But maybe you can give a bit more detail.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Rent seeking is an awful term that was from the beginning
| intended to describe anyone pursing a political or legal goal
| that deviates from a pure free market economy. As Econlib
| writes:
|
| > "Rent seeking" is one of the most important insights in the
| last fifty years of economics and, unfortunately, one of the
| most inappropriately labeled. Gordon Tullock originated the
| idea in 1967, and Anne Krueger introduced the label in 1974.
| The idea is simple but powerful. People are said to seek
| rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through
| the political arena. They typically do so by getting a
| subsidy for a good they produce or for being in a particular
| class of people, by getting a tariff on a good they produce,
| or by getting a special regulation that hampers their
| competitors. Elderly people, for example, often seek higher
| Social Security payments; steel producers often seek
| restrictions on imports of steel; and licensed electricians
| and doctors often lobby to keep regulations in place that
| restrict competition from unlicensed electricians or doctors.
|
| https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentSeeking.html
|
| This is linked in the wikipedia article, which is even more
| confused:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| No, it dates back to Adam Smith's conception of rents
| derived from land-ownership as a parasitic drag on
| economies (about which he was entirely correct). This
| concept was later extended to a whole host of other forms
| of monopolization, some state-granted and some market-
| derived. In the case of U.S. copyright, we can look at its
| original terms (quite limited) and see that its current
| incarnation is more harmful than beneficial to most people.
| notahacker wrote:
| If Microsoft doesn't get royalty free rights to resell access
| to everyone's content on demand, _China_ will become the
| powerhouse of interference-free media? _Rrrrrright...._
| truculent wrote:
| Are media really rent-seeking? They create new content and
| analysis, for which they want to be compensated. It seems quite
| different to hoarding natural resources or land, for example.
| glerk wrote:
| > It seems quite different to hoarding natural resources or
| land
|
| Indeed, it is quite different, because those things are
| scarce physical things in the real world. Intellectual
| property is a scam, and killing it once and for all will be
| one of the best things to come out of the current AI hype
| cycle. Nobody will "own" ideas, pieces of information, or
| strings of bytes.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Interesting. So as a hobby photographer I should only
| publicly release physical prints? An interesting idea.
| bonzini wrote:
| > GPT-4V can easily whitewash its entire copyrighted training
| corpus to be unrecognizably distinct
|
| Is that just by increasing the temperature, tweaking the
| prompt, etc.? If you can operate on the raw weights and
| recreate the original text, copyright infringement still
| applies.
| maxlin wrote:
| This is the actual truth. What it sucks for is for citing the
| data, but GPT-4 doesn't do that to start with unless it's
| directly from a web result and not the weights.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > _2. Research /hosting/progress will proceed. The US cannot
| stop this, only choose to be left behind. The world will move
| on, with China gleefully watching as their biggest rival
| commits intellectual suicide all to appease rent seeking media
| companies._
|
| Sorry, is this the same China that has already introduced their
| own sweeping regulations on AI? Which in at least one instance
| forced a Chinese startup to shut down their newly launched
| chatbot because it said things that didn't align with the
| party's official stance on the war in Ukraine?
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/beijing-tries-regulate-china-...
|
| https://nitter.unixfox.eu/CDT/status/1625936306814717952?337...
|
| I don't disagree that research/hosting/progress will continue,
| but I'm not so sure that it's China who stands to benefit from
| the US adding some guardrails to this rollercoaster.
| DalasNoin wrote:
| About your 1. point: you can't possibly know that future models
| will be trained exclusively on synthetic data without any hit
| to performance. It is also not easy to reword the entire
| copyrighted training corpus without introducing errors or
| hallucinations. And you assume that this is just a fact?
|
| Your second point reminds me a bit of 'War with the Newts'
| where humanity arms a race of sentient salamanders until they
| overthrow humanity. How could we not arm our newts if Germany
| might be arming theirs?
|
| I also think basically everything else you wrote is wrong.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| Rule 1 of the Internet: If you put it on the Internet, it's not
| yours anymore.
|
| You don't have to agree with it. You don't have to like it. But
| if you accept it and live by it, it's _much_ harder to get
| burned.
| krapp wrote:
| Rule 1 of the internet is "don't talk about /b/."
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I think it can be simultaneously true that NYT is accurate in
| their complaint, while having no legal remedy for this and that
| there shouldn't be.
|
| There are plenty of large companies in other sectors that
| acknowledge there are limited legal remedies for them if
| someone copies some aspect of their business or name.
| kolinko wrote:
| Worth noting, that - at least the screenshot - shows an example
| of browsing functionality used to go around paywalls, not that
| the model itself is trained, or can reproduce the articles
| really.
|
| IIRC this was the reason why the browsing plugin was disabled for
| some time after its introduction - they were patching up this
| hole.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I love seeing all the AI sycophants squirm at this news.
|
| Here's to hoping NYT wins this one and gets everything they ask
| for, and more!
| ugjka wrote:
| I don't know if winning this will improve their business model
|
| I don't use chat gpt to get the news but also i don't buy
| paywalls
| habosa wrote:
| People who think the examples the lawsuit are "fair use" need to
| consider what that would mean. We're basically going to let a few
| companies consolidate all the value on the Internet into their
| black boxes with basically no rules ... that seems very dangerous
| to me.
|
| I hope a court establishes some rules of engagement here, even if
| it's not this case.
| w4ffl35 wrote:
| Scraping is legal, and this seems like a transformative work to
| me.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Returning the full text of an article verbatim seems to me
| like the opposite of "transformative."
| Symmetry wrote:
| In the screenshot for the article you can see that the LLM
| says it is "Searching for: carl zimmer article on the
| oldest DNA". That, and what I know about how LLMs work,
| suggest to me that rather than the article being stored
| inside the trained LLM it was instead downloaded in
| response to the question. So the fact that the system is
| providing the full text of the article doesn't really go to
| whether training the LLM is a transformative use or not.
| bonzini wrote:
| Yes, the screenshot in the article is clearly doing an
| Internet search. The exhibit in the lawsuit shows that
| you can complete an article by using GPT on the first
| sentence of the prompt, with low temperature to aid
| reproducibility, and obtaining the original except for a
| single word. That is another thing, and it shows that the
| LLM has basically recorded the original text into its
| weights in compressed form:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GCY4WC6XYAAq-
| JS?format=jpg&name=...
| mattdesl wrote:
| It would be curious to test this on a larger sample than
| just a few. It is hard to believe that a majority of NYT
| articles are verbatim stored in the weights of a web-wide
| LLM, but if that is the case it would be a pretty
| unbelievable revelation about their ability to compress
| an entire web's worth of data. But, more likely, I assume
| it is a case of overfitting, or simply finding a prompt
| that happened to work well.
|
| FWIW, I can't replicate on either GPT 3.5 or 4, but it
| may be that OpenAI has added new measures to prevent
| this.
| dwringer wrote:
| I have attempted this sort of thing with GPT 3.5 many
| times and never been successful, although I've still
| never been taken off of the GPT4 waiting list that I
| signed up for months ago and I'm not going to subscribe
| without trying it first. I [and presumably many thousands
| of others] have tried things like this with many LLMs and
| image generating models, but to my knowledge we've come
| up rather short. I've never managed to recreate anything
| verbatim and have struggled to get anything resembling a
| copyright infringement out of stable diffusion with the
| sole exception of a meme image of Willy Wonka.
|
| That said, the meme image of Willy Wonka comes out of
| stable diffusion 1.5 almost perfectly with surprising
| frequency. Then again, this is probably because it
| appeared hundreds or thousands of times in the training
| set in all sorts of contexts because it's such a popular
| meme. There is a tension between its status as an
| integral part of language and its nature as a copyrighted
| screen grab.
| bonzini wrote:
| You can't reproduce on the web interface, because the
| temperature settings are higher than what's required to
| compress the text. You need to use the API.
|
| However, I had good luck reproducing poems on GPT 3.5,
| both copyrighted and not copyrighted, because the choice
| of words is a lot more "specific" so to speak, and
| therefore higher temperature isn't enough to prevent
| complete reproduction of the originals. See https://chat.
| openai.com/share/f6dbfb78-7c55-4d89-a92e-f4da23...
| (Italian; the second example is entirely hallucinated
| even though a poem with that title exists, while the
| first and third are recalled perfectly).
| mattdesl wrote:
| It doesn't seem that surprising; compared to entire NYT
| articles, poems are short, structured and more likely to
| be shared in multiple places across the web.
|
| I'm more surprised that it can repeat 100 articles; if
| that behaviour is consistent in larger sample sizes and
| beyond just NYT dataset (which might be repeated on the
| web more than other sources, causing overfitting), that
| would be impressive.
|
| You could imagine at some point a large enough GPT5 or 6
| or 7 will be able to memorize verbatim every corner of
| the web.
| tantalor wrote:
| That's not what "transformative" means for copyright.
|
| It's more like, is the new work a distinct expression, e.g.
| satire or commentary, based on the original.
|
| You can reproduce the original verbatim and still be
| transformative by adding an element of critique.
|
| Example: https://www.dmca.com/articles/akilah-obviously-vs-
| sargon-of-...
| alphaoverlord wrote:
| I don't think the examples shown reflect an element of
| critique.
| SmoothBrain123 wrote:
| Are you talking about search engines, or something else?
| stainablesteel wrote:
| a court has established this already
|
| in japan, where they said anything goes for ai
|
| so its best to not to lose a competitive edge with things that
| people openly publish on the internet, if you put it out there
| for everyone to see then expect other people to use it
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| A court in Japan will have no impact on the outcome of a
| copyright lawsuit in USA. Not to mention that it doesn't
| really matter how a Japanese court ruled since it's all
| governed by treaties anyway. They will change their laws if
| required to.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| its not about applying laws across different countries
|
| its about a precedent. If you don't keep up with
| international competition, you lose.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| Japan has the right idea about this matter.
| serjester wrote:
| I see the exact opposite - any open source model is going to
| become prohibitively expensive to train if quality data costs
| billions of dollars. We're going to be left with the OpenAI's
| and Google's of the world as the only players in the space
| until someone solves synthetic data.
| wraptile wrote:
| Exactly this. I work at a small web scraping company (so I
| might be a bit bias) and any small business can collect a
| fair, capable datasets of public data for model training,
| sentiment analysis or whatever today. If public data is
| stopped by copyright as this lawsuit implies that would just
| mean only giant corporations and pirates would be able to
| afford this.
|
| This would be a huge blow to open-source and research
| developers and I'd even argue it could help openAI to get a
| bit of a moat ala regulatory capture.
| pas wrote:
| research is fair use, also providing something amazing like
| Wikipedia is arguably educational (again fair use),
| reselling NYT articles on-demand via an API is by itself
| neither, so likely not free use
| lesuorac wrote:
| You may remember the Google Books lawsuit where Google was
| digitally copying the entirety of books and making them
| available online.
|
| Google won that suit under fair-use as a massive searchable
| database was found to be transformative as well as the non-
| commercial nature.
|
| So; if your web scraping companies goal is to allow people
| to bypass a paywall I suspect you'll have trouble in the
| future. If your web scraping company instead say allows
| people to do market analysis on how many people need a
| piano tuner in NYC and it doesn't do that by copying a NYT
| article doing original research I think you'll be fine.
| xbar wrote:
| This feels like a 1996 "music is too expensive for kids so
| they HAVE to pirate it."
| serjester wrote:
| NYT is seeking billions of dollars - I'm not sure that's a
| fair comparison.
| elif wrote:
| At some point the burden of carrying 100 year old
| copywriter/patent law will become so onerous a burden on the pace
| of progress that its enforcement will be antihuman.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| It already is, but I don't think this is a good example. NYT
| has a legitimate case here. They own the material they publish,
| and GPT-4 is shown to be able to recall entire articles
| verbatim. That's a violation, clear as day.
|
| The thing about lawsuits is that you make dozens of claims, and
| the court can rule in favor of some of them, and against
| others. The question of _" is LLM training fair use?"_ hasn't
| made it to a high court yet. The court could very easily rule
| against everything else in the suit.
| elif wrote:
| A photocopier can reproduce entire articles verbatim, yet no
| one calls for the destruction of all photocopiers. In fact,
| many legitimate legal uses of photocopiers to reproduce whole
| newspaper articles take place commonly by archivists,
| journalists, students, etc.
|
| It is the specific use of article photocopies to circumvent
| the normal sale of newspapers that becomes illegal.. and even
| that is questionable. If I read the newspaper left out in a
| waiting room and it keeps me from buying that days paper,
| this is not a criminal act.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > All of that costs money, and The Times earns that by limiting
| access to its reporting through a robust paywall.
|
| Not to be pedantic, but NYT has the _least_ robust paywall I 've
| ever seen. Just turn on reader mode in your browser. Simple. I
| get that it's still tresspassing if I walk into an unlocked
| house, but NYT could try installing a lock that isn't made of
| confetti and uncooked pasta.
| kweingar wrote:
| The thing that bothers me about the whole situation is that
| OpenAI prohibits using its model output as training data for your
| own models.
|
| It seems more than a bit hypocritical, no? When it comes to their
| own training data, they claim to have the right to use any/all of
| humanity's intellectual output. But for your own training data,
| you can use everything _except_ for their product, conveniently
| for them.
| cpt100 wrote:
| Given that Harvard President plagiarized her way into becoming a
| President, how can we be sure that NYT doesn't plagiarize and
| take content from X and other places to quickly chrun out daily
| news?
| andy99 wrote:
| This, or a lawsuit like it is going to be the SCO vs IBM of the
| 2020's, to wit: a copyright troll trying to extract rent, with
| various special interests cheering it on to try and promote their
| own agenda (ironically it was Microsoft that played that role
| with SCO). It's funny how times have changed and at least now a
| louder group seem to be on the troll's side. I hope to see some
| better analysis on the frivolity of this come out. There may be
| some commercial subtlety in specific cases that doesn't depend on
| scraping and training, but fundamentally using public internet
| data for training is not copying, is fair use, and is better for
| society as a whole than whatever ridiculous alternative might be
| proposed.
|
| edit: I'm speaking about training broadly capable foundation
| models like GPTn. It would of course be possible to build a model
| that only parrots copyrighted content and it would be hard to
| argue that is fair use.
| dannyr wrote:
| NYTimes has a paywall. Is that public internet and therefore
| fair use?
| yreg wrote:
| They don't have the paywall up if you identify as a search
| engine scraper, so it is kinda public internet. (I'm not
| claiming it's fair use.)
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Using the words troll and frivolous undermines your otherwise
| decent point and in fact goes against your point.
|
| The law isn't settled, it's a genuine legal question mark.
|
| It ain't frivolous or trolling or ridiculous.
| logicchains wrote:
| >It's funny how times have changed and at least now a louder
| group seem to be on the troll's side
|
| Because for many people, their views on current events are
| whatever the "thought leaders" working for the NYT and similar
| publications tell them to think.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> There may be some commercial subtlety in specific cases that
| doesn't depend on scraping and training
|
| The key is to stop calling it "training" and use "learning" or
| just "reading".
|
| The argument from NYT will probably be that LLMs are just a
| fancy way to compress or abstract information and spit it back
| out. In which case "training" seems to support their case?
| mycall wrote:
| I don't recall the source, but when people read, they
| typically only remember 20% of what they read (or heard?).
| Machine training encodes much more than 20%, so it is much
| closer to copying than training. Now the emergent abilities
| that come from this could be considered learning and dare I
| say imagination (which is the opposite of copying).
| xbar wrote:
| That is an irrelevant comparison.
|
| This is theft and monstrous profit from theft. For actual
| justice this should be a class action suit of the world vs.
| OpenAI/Microsoft and the financial consequences should be
| company-ending for OpenAI. Otherwise, you have incented
| everyone in the AI industry to steal as much as they can for as
| long as they can.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Looks like this is a case of Media vs Tech which might be solved
| by the courts using past paradigms but should really be addresses
| by legislation specific to this situation. The difficulty for the
| media companies, at least in the US, is that both major political
| parties see the media as the enemy. The left might be a bit more
| positive about the media but overall, they still see the media as
| something owned by wealthy elites suppressing knowledge of the
| harm the powerful inflict on the weak and powerless. Over on the
| Tech side of things, one party sees Tech as wholly owned by other
| side of the political divide. Over on that side, things are
| relatively (but not completely) friendly, so my guess is Tech
| will end up winning simply because it has more friends in the
| political realm than the Media does.
| djhope99 wrote:
| This argument that the LLM is learning seems slightly flawed when
| you consider that other experts in the field consider it more
| like lossy compression. If it's lossy compression that's really
| happening here then you can understand the copyright argument.
| It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, lots of new
| ground breaking.
| exabrial wrote:
| I'm actually fine with this. Copyright holders never consented to
| having their work used in this manner.
| lwhi wrote:
| Surely there's no chance OpenAI would agree to this?
|
| Isn't it more likely that the company buys the NYT?
| hazmazlaz wrote:
| I'd rather have GPT than the NY Times, if I had to choose between
| one or the other.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I think Apple has really got ahead of this game: early deals to
| pay for AI training data/content. I need to do some research but
| I think Anthropic also does this.
|
| After a year of largely using OpenAI APIs, I am now much more
| into smaller "open" models for I hope the major contributors like
| Meta/Facebook are following Apple's lead. Off topic, but: even
| finding the smaller "open" models much less capable, they capture
| my imagination and my personal research time.
| efields wrote:
| Not sure if they're ahead but I think it was smart to not ship
| anything LLMlike until the regulations get made first movers
| test the waters.
|
| Casey Newton has been saying all year that these things will be
| awesome once we can unleash them on our own corpus of data
| safely. "Siri" already does a great job digging through my
| photos and picking the good memories. I can let my camera roll
| become a visual junk drawer now.
|
| Do the same for my email. Make "Find" the tool we always wanted
| to be. I don't care if I'm conflating LLMs/AI with other smart
| tech.
| dewbrite wrote:
| Summarizing the article: The most damning thing here is the
| "ChatGPT as a search engine" feature, which appears to run an
| agent which performs a search, visits pages, and returns the best
| results.
|
| In doing this, it is bypassing the NY Times paywall, and you can
| read full articles from today by repeatedly asking for the next
| paragraph.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Not that it would solve this, but how hard would it be for
| ChatGpt or other problems to cite the sources used in a response.
| Is that difficult to capture and tag to 'knowledge' within a LLM?
| It could be a best of both worlds type situation if LLMs cited
| sources and linked to the source itself. Isn't that what happened
| with Google News's home page? I seem to recall that when Google
| took it away in some markets, at the behest of the news orgs,
| they quickly reversed course as their traffic plummeted.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| not likely with the way these models have been trained - its
| basically broken down into sub-words that are all mashed
| together into probabilities.
| qznc wrote:
| This is not possible. There is no database of sources inside an
| LLM. Just like the knowledge in your brain does not have
| sources attached.
|
| For an example, you referenced "what happened with Google
| News's home page". Could you give me your source? You could
| probably search for some suitable article for a reference, but
| you don't know a source from your memory.
| ctoth wrote:
| Isn't the fundamental issue here that the NYT was available in
| Common Crawl?
|
| If they didn't want to share their content, why did they allow it
| to be scraped?
|
| If they did want to share their content, why do they care (hint:
| $88 billion)?
|
| Or is it that they wanted to share their content with Google and
| other search engines in order to bring in readers but now that an
| AI was trained on it they are angry?
|
| What wrong thing did OpenAI do specific to using Common Crawl?
|
| Didn't most companies use Common Crawl? Excepting Google, who had
| already scraped the whole damn Internet anyway and just used
| their search index?
|
| Is it legal or not to scrape the web?
|
| If I scrape the web, is it legal to train a transformer on it?
| Why or why not?
|
| To me, this is an incredibly open-and-shut case. You put
| something on the web, people will read that something. If that is
| illegal, Google is illegal.
|
| Oh, and do you see the part in the article where they are
| butthurt that it can reproduce the NYT style?
|
| > "Defendants' GenAI tools can generate output that recites Times
| content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its
| expressive style, as demonstrated by scores of examples," the
| suit alleges.
|
| Mimics its expressive style. Oh golly the robots can write like
| they're smug NYT reporters now--better sue!
|
| It appears that the NYT changed their terms of service in August
| to disallow their content in Common Crawl[0]. Wasn't GPT-4
| trained far before August?
|
| 0]: https://www.adweek.com/media/the-new-york-times-updates-
| term...
| rfw300 wrote:
| If you read the complaint, it explains this pretty well. The
| use of copyrighted content by search engines is fundamentally
| different from the way LLMs use that same content. The former
| directs traffic (and therefore $$) to the publisher, the latter
| keeps the traffic for itself.
|
| The legal misconception I want to flag in your logic is the
| notion that all uses of the Common Crawl are equally
| infringing/non-infringing. If you use the Common Crawl to
| create a list of how often every word in English appears on the
| internet, that's unquestionably transformative use. But if you
| use it to host a mirror of the NYT website with free articles,
| that's definitely infringement. The legality of scraping is one
| matter, and the legality of what you do with the scraped
| content is quite another.
| ctoth wrote:
| From my original comment:
|
| > Is it legal or not to scrape the web?
|
| > If I scrape the web, is it legal to train a transformer on
| it? Why or why not?
|
| At no point did I say anything about hosting a mirror of the
| NYT website, with free articles. Obviously. Because OpenAI
| didn't do that. Some NYT lawyer tried to get ChatGPT to write
| a NYT article. Maybe first they should have actually done a
| Google search and shut down some of the actual content farms
| which simply copy NYT content such as [0]. But instead, we
| get this.
|
| [0]: https://salaminv.com/news_file/
| j0hnyl wrote:
| I hope the world can rally and move past these anachronistic
| ideas of intellectual property.
| sylware wrote:
| If they don't let AIs to be trained on a maximum of data as
| possible, those AIs will be less "good" than the ones trained
| without constraints like you will have in China or elsewhere, and
| people will mechanically start using the later.
|
| Unless they engage in massive IP and DNS banning, geolocation
| based, that forced upon all internet users and "external" users.
| poorman wrote:
| Sad to say but I would believe a hallucination from OpenAI before
| I would believe anything that comes out of the NY Times. I mean
| the confidence interval for the NY Times is what again?
| andy99 wrote:
| I don't think the lawsuit has any merit, but I'd still like to
| encourage Sam Altman et al, if they really care about the greater
| good, to go Keyser Soze and immediately release torrents of the
| weights and source code for GPT-4 under GPL.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > I don't think the lawsuit has any merit
|
| The lawsuit fundamentally has merit. It asks a huge open
| question that no one knows the answer to. The outcome will be
| extraordinarily impactful. The question must be answered at
| some point.
|
| The case has merit even if NYT loses across the board.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I can see how someone can disagree with the NYT position but
| the idea that it lacks merit is wild!
|
| AI might be the defining issue of copyright law for decades.
| There are so many open questions, and this seems like just
| the start.
| ls612 wrote:
| How is the question being asked different from the Google
| Books case?
| smitty1110 wrote:
| You're not just display the contents of copyrighted works
| publicly, they're selling access. This flips the script for
| the 1st factor of the Fair Use test. Additionally, by
| selling it to people who use it to get news summaries, you
| can argue you damage the market for a NY Times
| subscription, which triggers the 4th factor.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I don't think anybody has claimed that OpenAI is causing
| NYT subscriptions to go up. NYT has even expressly made the
| claim they're losing potential revenue.
|
| > [1] On the most important factor, possible economic
| damage to the copyright owner, [Judge] Chin wrote that
| "Google Books enhances the sales of books to the benefit of
| copyright holders."
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._G
| oogle,....
| Racing0461 wrote:
| > The question must be answered at some point.
|
| agreed. in the same way Colorado supreme court ruled trump
| can't be on the ballot to force scotus to rule i think is the
| same reasoning here. get an answer earlier rather than later.
| glimshe wrote:
| For the good of the world, let's hope the NYT loses across
| the board. It's basically behaving like a copyright troll
| here.
| mongol wrote:
| I am of opposite opinion. I think it is unreasonable to
| train AI using copyrighted information without permission
| from the copyright holder, at least if it is done to create
| a proprietary product. It is probable even unreasonable if
| the end result would not be proprietary but at least that
| would benefit the world more.
| jpfr wrote:
| AFAIK the IP deal with Microsoft only covers development
| _before AGI_.
|
| So at any point OpenAI could declare that a sufficient degree
| of AGI has been achieved and thus return to its philanthropic
| mission. With GPLed models and all.
|
| However, at this point the employees expect a multi-million
| cash-out for each of them. So the philanthropic mission seems
| to be gone out the window.
|
| And probably that's also the way Sam Altman got back into the
| CEO role. By maximizing the expected eventual cash-out for the
| employees which threatened to leave otherwise.
| Racing0461 wrote:
| > OpenAI could declare that a sufficient degree of AGI has
| been achieved and thus return to its philanthropic mission
|
| The response from MSFT's legal team would be biblical if
| openai pulled this.
| edgyquant wrote:
| It's literally in the contract such a distinction is at
| OpenAIs discretion
| jackdaniel wrote:
| Technically firing CEO was also at the board's
| discretion, so I'm dubious whether that means anything at
| this point.
| Racing0461 wrote:
| The lawsuit won't be about the clause, it would be about
| the definition of AGI.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Luckily MS is now on the board so they'll have a say in when
| AGI is declared
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Two not-so subtle paragraphs about the "partnership" between
| Microsoft and OpenAI:
|
| > 15. Microsoft Corporation is a Washington corporation with a
| principal place of business and headquarters in Redmond,
| Washington. Microsoft has invested at least $13 billion in OpenAI
| Global LLC in exchange for which Microsoft will receive 75% of
| that company's profits until its investment is repaid, after
| which Microsoft will own a 49% stake in that company.
|
| > 16. Microsoft has described its relationship with the OpenAI
| Defendants as a "partnership." This partnership has included
| contributing and operating the cloud computing services used to
| copy Times Works and train the OpenAI Defendants' GenAI models.
| It has also included, upon information and belief, substantial
| technical collaboration on the creation of those models.
| Microsoft possesses copies of, or obtains preferential access to,
| the OpenAI Defendants' latest GenAI models that have been trained
| on and embody unauthorized copies of the Times Works. Microsoft
| uses these models to provide infringing content and, at times,
| misinformation to users of its products and online services.
| During a quarterly earnings call in October 2023, Microsoft noted
| that "more than 18,000 organizations now use Azure OpenAI
| Service, including new-to-Azure customers."
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > Because the outputs of Defendants' GenAI models compete with
| and closely mimic the inputs used to train them, copying Times
| works for that purpose is not fair use.
|
| This is interesting. The NYT is specifically saying that the way
| you use an LLM impacts what you can legally use for training the
| LLM. They're firing shots at the big guys trying to sell access
| to an LLM, but not at the little guy self-hosting for fun or
| academics doing research.
| lesuorac wrote:
| They're probably saying that because its what the supreme court
| said except about a human copying a work created by another
| human.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176881182/supreme-court-side...
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| That's a good bet.
|
| Down at the bottom of the linked PDF are some more
| interesting allegations:
|
| Count 5 - MS/OpenAI removed NYT copyright notices in
| violation of the DMCA.
|
| Count 7 - By attributing hallucinated garbage to NYT,
| MS/OpenAI is diluting NYT trademarks in violation of US
| Trademark law.
|
| I admit: I laughed. This will be an entertaining lawsuit to
| follow.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| What will ultimately happen is that OpenAI and all big tech
| with have to pay out some sizable sum to large copyright
| holders, and in exchange be granted a de facto exclusive
| right to develop these technologies further because they're
| the only ones who can do so "responsibly" with respect to
| copyright. It will take a long time to wind its way through
| the courts, but this could be the death knell for open
| source LLMs in the US.
| danielbln wrote:
| Meanwhile, open source LLMs are excluded from stringendo
| regulation in the US, abd with Mistral there is some
| knowhow that isn't in SV, which is also jicem
| trevelyan wrote:
| The prompts shown literally invite the LLM to complete
| the copyrighted text by providing unedited selections and
| asking the machine to finish those. Even if this is
| problematic in a small number of cases it is not a use
| case that undermines the business model of the newspaper
| since it requires the reader to have access to the
| original text. Nor will it be easy to demonstrate
| economic harm since this is not how readers consume news
| and is very far from how users interact with LLMs. Nor
| are the archival materials used for training remotely
| reflective of the "time-sensitive" articles that
| newspapers sell. And archival materials are easily
| available elsewhere so where is the case for economic
| harm?
|
| The courts are going to rule that LLM training is a
| transformative use case that is protected as fair use
| under copyright law. They may rule that if an LLM-powered
| service is explicitly designed to enable copyright
| violation that is illegal, but there is no way any court
| is going to look at these examples and see it as anything
| other than the NYT fishing to try and generate a
| violation by using the LLM in a way that is very
| different than the service is intended to be used and
| which -- even if abused -- doesn't hurt the business
| model under which the text has been produced.
|
| The most likely outcome is that LLM providers will add
| some sort of filter on output to prevent machines from
| regurgitating source documents. But this isn't a court
| case the NYT can win without gutting fair use
| protections, and that would be a terrible thing.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Very interested how this turns out as IIUC copyright
| violations have statutory damages which the NYT won't have
| to prove.
|
| $750 [1] * 66 million records [the lawsuit] is basically 50
| billion.
|
| [1]: https://www.ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-
| instructions/node/706
| starchild3001 wrote:
| I asked an LLM to summarize the 69 page lawsuit. It does a decent
| job. Didn't infringe on any copyrights in the process :)
|
| Here is a summary of the key points from the legal complaint
| filed by The New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI:
|
| The New York Times filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against
| Microsoft and OpenAI alleging that their generative AI tools like
| ChatGPT and Bing Chat infringe on The Times's intellectual
| property rights by copying and reproducing Times content without
| permission to train their AI models.
|
| The Times invests enormous resources into producing high-quality,
| original journalism and has over 3 million registered copyrighted
| works. Its business models rely on subscriptions, advertising,
| licensing fees, and affiliate referrals, all of which require
| direct traffic to NYTimes.com.
|
| The complaint alleges Microsoft and OpenAI copied millions of
| Times articles, investigations, reviews, and other content on a
| massive scale without permission to train their AI models. The
| models encode and "memorize" copies of Times works which can be
| retrieved verbatim. Defendants' tools like ChatGPT and Bing then
| display this protected content publicly.
|
| OpenAI promised to freely share its AI research when founded in
| 2015 but pivoted to a for-profit model in 2019. Microsoft
| invested billions into OpenAI and provides all its cloud
| computing. Their partnership built special systems to scrape and
| store training data sets with Times content emphasized.
|
| The complaint includes many examples of the AI models reciting
| verbatim excerpts of Times articles, showing they were trained on
| this data. It also shows the models fabricating quotes and
| attributing them to the Times.
|
| Microsoft's integration of the OpenAI models into Bing Chat and
| other products boosted its revenues and market value
| tremendously. OpenAI's release of ChatGPT also made it hugely
| valuable. But their commercial success relies significantly on
| unlicensed use of Times works.
|
| The Times attempted to negotiate a deal with Microsoft and OpenAI
| but failed, hence this lawsuit. Generating substitute products
| that compete with inputs used to train models does not qualify as
| "fair use" exemptions to copyright. The Times seeks damages and
| injunctive relief.
|
| In summary, The New York Times alleges Microsoft and OpenAI's AI
| products infringe Times copyrights on a massive scale to unfairly
| benefit at The Times's expense. The Times invested heavily in
| content creation and controls how its work is used commercially.
| Using Times content without payment or permission to build
| competitive tools violates its rights under copyright law.
| starchild3001 wrote:
| A Second LLM's take on this lawsuit can be found below. I'd
| love to see OpenAI address these complaints publicly and
| without incurring any additional damages to NYT.
|
| The document is a legal complaint filed by The New York Times
| Company against Microsoft Corporation and various OpenAI
| entities, alleging copyright infringement and other related
| claims. The New York Times Company (The Times) accuses the
| defendants of unlawfully using its copyrighted works to create
| artificial intelligence (AI) products that compete with The
| Times, particularly generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)
| tools and large language models (LLMs). These tools, such as
| Microsoft's Bing Chat and OpenAI's ChatGPT, allegedly copy,
| use, and rely heavily on The Times's content without permission
| or compensation.
|
| Nature of the Action: The Times emphasizes the importance of
| independent journalism to democracy and claims its ability to
| continue providing this service is threatened by the
| defendants' actions. The complaint argues that the GenAI tools
| are built upon unlawfully copied New York Times content, which
| undermines The Times's investments in journalism.
|
| Defendants: The defendants include Microsoft Corporation and
| various OpenAI entities, such as OpenAI Inc., OpenAI LP, and
| several other related companies. The Times alleges these
| entities have worked together to create and profit from the
| GenAI tools in question.
|
| Allegations: 1. Copyright Infringement: The Times claims the
| defendants copied millions of its copyrighted articles and
| other content to train their GenAI models. This training
| allegedly involves large-scale copying and use of The Times's
| content, emphasizing its quality and value in building
| effective AI models.
|
| 2. Unlawful Competition: The Times argues that the defendants'
| GenAI tools compete with it by providing access to its content
| for free, which could potentially divert readers and revenue
| away from The Times.
|
| 3. Misattribution and Hallucinations: The Times asserts that
| the defendants' tools not only unlawfully distribute its
| content but also generate and attribute false information to
| The Times, damaging its credibility and trust with readers.
|
| 4. Trademark Dilution: The complaint includes claims that the
| defendants' use of The Times's trademarks in connection with
| lower-quality or inaccurate AI-generated content dilutes and
| tarnishes its brand.
|
| 5. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Violations: The Times
| alleges that the defendants removed or altered copyright
| management information from its works, which is prohibited
| under the law.
|
| Harm to The Times: The Times claims it has suffered significant
| harm from these actions, including loss of control over its
| content, damage to its reputation for accuracy and quality, and
| financial losses due to diminished traffic and revenue.
|
| Demands: The Times seeks various forms of relief, including
| statutory damages, injunctive relief to prevent further
| infringement, destruction of the infringing AI models, and
| compensation for losses and legal fees.
|
| Overall Summary: This legal complaint represents a significant
| clash between traditional media and emerging AI technology
| companies. It underscores the complex legal, ethical, and
| economic issues arising from the use of copyrighted content to
| train AI systems. The outcome of this case could have far-
| reaching implications for the AI industry, content creators,
| and the broader digital ecosystem.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| What if you were one of the people who read the Times from cover-
| to-cover every day and seriously tries to remember as much as
| possible because you consider it a trustworthy reference source?
|
| And if you were called upon to solve a problem based on knowledge
| you consider trustworthy, what would you come up with?
|
| What if you were even specifically directed to utilize only
| findings gleaned from the Times exclusively?
|
| And what if that was your only lifetime source of information
| whatsoever for some reason?
| jjeaff wrote:
| That would of course be fine.
|
| But then imagine that because human memory is not able to keep
| all that information straight, you made copies of all those
| newspapers.
|
| And then you started charging people for your knowledge.
|
| And then imagine that as part of your knowledge service, you
| would copy snippets from the times word for word and give that
| to your clients without citation and pass it off as your own.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Yup, that's the other side of the dodecahedron.
|
| As I understand it, it's the copying that can lead to
| infringement.
|
| Then again if you have acquired a legitimate copy, you should
| certainly be able to retain it and use it for reference.
|
| But for training a model on someone else's data I wouldn't
| even want a copy.
|
| Just skim the data and retain my own thoughts.
| test6554 wrote:
| How do I put this... Whether NYT is right or wrong, their case
| should be dismissed.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Huh, is this a big misunderstanding?
|
| The copilot screenshot they gave in the ars-technica article as
| well as many of the screenshots in the NYT article seems like
| it's actually displaying correct behavior for browsing the web.
|
| In these cases the system is more or less acting as a user agent
| (browser). AFAICT the NYT server actually gave that data to the
| user agent when it asked politely (200 OK, presumably). The user
| agent then displayed it to the user, which the user agent may do
| in any way it deems fit or appropriate.
|
| There's only one or two cases where this has gone against the
| user or user agent, in very specific circumstances. The server
| can eg say 403 Forbidden whenever it likes, so if it returns a
| 200 OK, what's a user agent to do other than believe it at its
| word?
|
| The only twist is that this user agent is now Imbued With AI
| (tm)(r)(c) . I don't think that really makes a difference here.
| If that's all this is, then it's more related to legal fights
| over certain ad-blockers or readability, which have similar
| functionality.
|
| * https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...
| , eg. page 45; I mean it says "Model: Web Browsing" at the top,
| and "Finished browsing" right on the page. That particular
| subsystem is now integrated, so the UI/UX is different now, but
| IIRC the link was in the pulldown?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Hum, on page 33 of the same complaint they show that they can
| get GPT to quote parts of an article from memory. Giving people
| single paragraphs need not be not illegal per-se. Very
| specifically, if you ask it for more than a paragraph at a
| time:
|
| > ' I'm unable to display the entire text of "Snow Fall: The
| Avalanche at Tunnel Creek" by John Branch, as it is a
| copyrighted work. However, you can easily access the full story
| online. It was published by The New York Times and is available
| on their website. The story is notable for its engaging
| multimedia format, including text, images, and interactive
| elements.'
|
| Specifically, they go out of their way to lead GPT on, asking
| for several paragraphs in a row.
|
| It's pretty clear that GPT is an avid reader of the NYT, so in
| that particular case we're going to have to see if OpenAI's
| fair use defense for training holds.
|
| (ps. in the current GPT-4, it's actually somewhat tricky to
| even get to the point above at all. They have probably been
| improving AI instructions)
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _NYT sues OpenAI, Microsoft over 'millions of articles' used to
| train ChatGPT_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38784194 -
| Dec 2023 (80 comments)
|
| _The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright
| infringement_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941 -
| Dec 2023 (837 comments)
|
| _The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I.'s Use of
| Copyrighted Work_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781863
| - Dec 2023 (11 comments)
| paulddraper wrote:
| _New York Times Sues Microsoft and OpenAI for 'Billions'_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791368 - Dec 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _New York Times Sues Microsoft and OpenAI, Alleging Copyright
| Infringement_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781718 -
| Dec 2023 (1 comment)
|
| _New York Times sues Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright
| infringement_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781908 -
| Dec 2023 (2 comments)
|
| _New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for using articles to
| train AI_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782510 - Dec
| 2023 (1 comment)
|
| _New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for allegedly
| infringing copyrighted work_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783699 - Dec 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft over use of its stories
| to train chatbots_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38784914 - Dec 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _NY Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for infringing copyrighted
| works_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38786330 - Dec
| 2023 (1 comment)
|
| _NYTimes sues OpenAI, Microsoft, for copyright infringement_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38790845 - Dec 2023 (1
| comment)
| dang wrote:
| I already went through those links and merged the comments
| into the above threads, so there's nothing in any of those
| (besides archive links to the articles).
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| I think this could be shakedown. They want money/licensing from
| openai the way apple was offering news companies recently. High
| probability this is settled out of court.
| labrador wrote:
| NYT wants to outlaw a math game created by calculating the
| probablities of word groupings and words following each other in
| NYT times articles, along with a lot of of other writings NYT
| does not own. The players roll the dice, so to speak, by seeding
| an initial string of words and whoever comes up with the most
| interesting paragraph wins. This paragraph may or may not look
| like NYT times writings, which in the larger scheme the collected
| writings of humankind, isn't particularly unique. It doesn't even
| have to be true. Hallucinations are an expected outcome.
|
| If a NYT article says "Henry Kissenger was known to eat ice cream
| on a hot day" and our game outputs the same, it is purely by
| chance. It cannot be proven the output was copied verbatim from
| the NYT because the fragment "Henry Kissenger was known to" and
| "eat ice cream on a hot day" are not unique to the NYT or
| exclusive to it.
|
| Is the NYT claiming ownership of the weights in LLMs?
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