[HN Gopher] The Financial Times and OpenAI strike content licens...
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The Financial Times and OpenAI strike content licensing deal
Author : kmdupree
Score : 30 points
Date : 2024-04-29 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
| artninja1988 wrote:
| Grim. This is just confirmation that the future of llms will be a
| walled garden of big tech and big rights holders. There's no open
| ecosystem if content needs to be licensed at prohibitive prices
| for small players/ universities/ open source. Between this and
| them lobbying for regulation closed ai is obviously pulling up
| the ladder behind them now that they're valued at $80 billion
| from being reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy just a few years
| ago before chatgpt
| sylvainkalache wrote:
| The publishing industry is in big trouble; journalists are
| fired, and publications are closing.
|
| Ads are not enough, and readers are fed up with ads, so they
| use adblockers, cutting publications' revenues. With AI
| chatbots, people browse these publications even less, further
| reducing revenues.
|
| Paywall and licensing content is the next best option, if not
| what it is?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Just wanted to chime in and say that I think you are both
| right. I haven't thought of a way to square this circle yet.
| I find this issue to be the fundamental concern around
| generative AI. Of course the Courts could always end up
| saying its fair game and at that point, I could see OpenAI no
| longer paying. And then content producers are more likely to
| gate content in a myriad of ways and the cat and mouse game
| will continue. I could also see the US say scraping is
| allowed and EU saying otherwise.
| __loam wrote:
| It seems to me that half the closures happen after some
| wealthy ass hole that seems to hate journalists buys a
| publication then runs it into the ground.
| slt2021 wrote:
| publishing indstury maybe be in trouble, but publishing
| itself is not.
|
| content creators are going direct to consumer with their
| content, and there is endless opportunity for actual content
| creators to thrive without publishing houses as middlemen
| __loam wrote:
| If you can't run your business without violating the property
| rights of millions of people, maybe your business shouldn't
| exist.
| artninja1988 wrote:
| These models will exist one way or another. Even the most IP
| concerned lawmakers in the deepest pockets of the RIAA and
| whatnot. It's just that some want there to be monopoly rents
| payed to themselves every time someone uses them
| nomel wrote:
| Maybe profit caps for models that use licensed/copyright
| content would make sense? That would leave general use of
| open source models alone, while still having the potential
| to flow money to the right people.
| jsheard wrote:
| > These models will exist one way or another.
|
| This line of reasoning seems more or less equivalent to
| "movie piracy will exist one way or another, therefore I
| should be allowed to launch a commercial Netflix competitor
| which streams movies without paying the studios". Just
| because it's _possible_ to appropriate content doesn 't
| mean we should just give up and put it in the public
| domain, that's obviously not sustainable.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Actually that sounds great. Commercial piracy netflix
| competitor please and thank you.
| jsheard wrote:
| Sounds great until the entertainment industry collapses
| because the inconvenience barrier which kept piracy at
| reasonable levels vanishes, with every theatre, TV
| channel and streaming service suddenly no longer paying
| for anything they show. I think you know that's not going
| to work.
| nomel wrote:
| This comment is direct, but not unreasonable. To steel man
| it...
|
| The success of the LLM were built by the work product of
| others, without compensation. Now those others are looking
| for their due compensation.
|
| Freely profiting off the, quite literally, compressed output
| of others isn't really a business model that's sustainable,
| for either side. The only sustainable solution would
| necessarily involves money going from the content users
| (multi B $ LLM companies) to the content producers (artists,
| news orgs, etc). For a logical litmus test, apply what's
| happening to any other content/industry.
| __loam wrote:
| I'm not sure AI businesses would be viable if they had to
| license all the content in addition to paying all the
| compute costs. But, that really isn't the rightsholders'
| problem.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| That's the clearest indication that OpenAI should be
| seeking permissions and paying rightsholders for training
| data.
|
| If OpenAI loses value as a company if it does not have
| that content, that indicates the content has value, and
| OpenAI should pay for the materials they 'use' to create
| their own value.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Hey thats fine if you have that opinion.
|
| I just hope you are consistent in that you oppose the
| existing ubiquitous copyright violations done by the entire
| art industry, in the form of commercial "fan art", or
| similar.
|
| A whole lot of content is built off of other people's
| works, and much of it is not done "in fair use", but of
| course, then the shoe is on the other foot, those same
| creators complain.
| __loam wrote:
| I have a lot of trouble taking this obviously bad faith
| argument seriously. Aside from the fact that we're
| comparing random fan artists with well resourced tech
| corporations that trained on hundreds of millions of
| images, most rightsholders seem to appreciate that fan
| art is free publicity for them. If nobody is going after
| fan art, then there's not really a problem. On the other
| hand, many people and organizations seem pretty happy to
| file suits against OpenAI.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Sounds good to me. I don't see why anyone else should feel they
| have the rights to content just to train crappy chat bots. Real
| people with real families and real mortgages created that
| content.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| In this case is it better that they get money and rich people
| consolidate more power over an emerging and likely
| influential technology, or is it better that they don't and
| open source is able to flourish?
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| They're only licensing what they have to under threat of
| lawsuit. Little people's data will still be taken without
| refund.
| SirMaster wrote:
| What's the alternative?
|
| Do you feel that entities like The Financial Times should just
| willingly or be forced to give up all their data to the public?
| cess11 wrote:
| Sure. Just like it always was, like when libraries buy
| magazines and papers and archive them, giving the public
| access to their contents.
| sgt101 wrote:
| The difference is that mega-corps are ripping off content
| and reselling it. I hope that the FT can sustain itself for
| a long time using the money from this deal.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| That was the intent of copyright, until it was extended from
| 14 years to beyond the heat death of the universe.
|
| Maybe we should go back to 14 years for use in AI models?
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| This is fine because LLMs are a dead end.
|
| If LLMs are the core of 'AI' then I'm not interested, but I
| feel confident they're a sideshow on the way to stronger AI.
|
| Lets avoid the huge mistake that was made with the internet,
| where the web happened to be the first broadly useful tool
| which exploded in popularity and then de facto became the
| internet, with everything shoehorned into it. The problem is,
| on the scale of possible interfaces and software, the web is
| absolute shite, but now its gravity is too great and we can't
| escape it.
|
| I've tried to use LLMs but they're just not useful. Getting
| answers that may be great or may be nonsense just doesn't work
| for me. I know there is something better and I won't be
| distracted by a very impressive novelty.
| throwup238 wrote:
| I don't think they're a dead end, they're just a very small
| piece of a much bigger puzzle. LLMs are to AI what word2vec
| was to machine learning - it's the key to encoding language
| in a way that algorithms can operate on but they need to be
| connected to a bunch of other systems to really be useful.
|
| I think it'll be a while before we perfect memory,
| neuroplasticity, the physical experimentation feedback loop,
| etc. but LLMs at least give us a way to represent and
| manipulate human language.
| andy99 wrote:
| OpenAI and other big VC funded LLM companies were all destined
| for enshittification anyway. They'll try and regulatory capture
| their way to monopoly and then offer a much worse product for
| more money. Luckily (hopefully) the cat is out of the bag and
| there are enough good, geographically diverse alternatives to
| prevent any serious regulatory capture efforts. Worst case
| we'll all be fleeing to the freedom of the Chinese LLMs.
| aelmeleegy wrote:
| Is this just inevitable now?
|
| I also can't believe that these media companies haven't learned
| the lesson they shouldn't have learned by looking what happened
| with Google and saying maybe we shouldn't give that away, at any
| cost. Like what's their bargaining position after the training
| has been done?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| that lesson isn't worth much to an industry that has constant
| solvency issues
| bilbo0s wrote:
| They did learn their lesson with google.
|
| That's why they're taking the money that OpenAI/Microsoft is
| offering.
|
| They tried to do it in court with google and never got anywhere
| with it. So this time around they just take the money from
| whoever is willing to write the biggest check.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| This should have happened years ago, and not just with one big
| publisher.
| omnicognate wrote:
| FT press release (not paywalled):
| https://aboutus.ft.com/press_release/openai
| someotherperson wrote:
| I wonder if this is some long play by OpenAI:
|
| 1. OpenAI is trying (and failing?) to add legal restrictions on
| LLM (and co) training to only a few major players.
|
| 2. By entering into licensing agreements, it starts to set the
| standard and essentially forces the above to take place as only a
| few major players would be financially able to afford it.
| 5- wrote:
| yes, the concerns around limiting access to the newcomers are
| valid, but there's the other side to the deal:
|
| > In addition, the FT became a customer of ChatGPT Enterprise
| earlier this year, purchasing access for all FT employees to
| ensure its teams are well-versed in the technology and can
| benefit from the creativity and productivity gains made possible
| by OpenAI's tools.
|
| i.e. ft is going to be written by llms now.
| stanleykm wrote:
| Just skip the middleman and have chatgpt generate financial
| times articles to train on
| dmurray wrote:
| So does this set a precedent that OpenAI knows it should be
| paying the millions of rights holders who didn't grant it a
| license and yet saw it use their IP to generate billions of
| dollars of revenue?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| This is not the first publisher OpenAI has paid for rights to
| its content.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-13/openai-ax...
| jcranmer wrote:
| One of the factors in fair use analysis is whether or not there
| exists a market for licensing for the use in question, and this
| is conventionally given the strongest weight in fair use
| analysis.
|
| So yes, making agreements to license content does illustrate
| that there exists a market for using text in AI training, and
| it will do a lot of damage to arguments that it's all fair use.
| woopsn wrote:
| From behind the paywall -- NYT sued them, and so OAI will pursue
| for now licensing arrangements with some major media outlets at
| least.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related official post:
|
| _We're bringing the Financial Times' world-class journalism to
| ChatGPT_
|
| https://openai.com/blog/content-partnership-with-financial-t...
|
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197303)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| FT release:
|
| https://aboutus.ft.com/press_release/openai
|
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199571)
| lumb63 wrote:
| I can't understand why publications would strike deals for their
| content to be used for training LLMs. It seems incredibly short-
| sighted to me. They gain a windfall in exchange for what is
| basically nailing their own coffin shut.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I don't know man? Ad revenue is plummeting. No one else is
| buying their content.
|
| What is the alternative path that is as lucrative as taking
| that big 4$$ check from OpenAI/Microsoft? I mean the only real
| alternative is that Google, Facebook, or Amazon write you a
| bigger check. But you're still at the same place because they'd
| only write that check to train their models as well.
|
| The industry is backed into a corner. If no one else will pay,
| they have to take money from the only person who will.
| tivert wrote:
| > What is the alternative path that is as lucrative as taking
| that big 4$$ check from OpenAI/Microsoft?
|
| I can imagine LLMs tipping the balance back in favor of
| something like traditional media. In short: people go nuts
| with them, and flood the open web with garbage (which may
| have the added benefit of degrading LLMs). That could,
| compared to the last 20 years, make curation and verified
| provenance far more important for people who value having the
| chance to know real things, which would drive customers back
| to pay-walled media organizations and publishers.
|
| That may not happen, or may not happen on a time-frame
| compatible with most current media organizations. It would
| certainly take some time for everyday users to develop the
| necessary fatigue with LLMs and their output to motivate
| action.
|
| I think it'd also depend on the LLM companies losing in court
| on copyright grounds. If the LLM companies win, I think we'll
| still get the crapflood, but the islands of sanity resisting
| the tide will be smaller or nonexistent. If LLMs put the
| final nail in the coffin of the media orgs, Wikipedia will
| die soon after (it's got separate culture problems that may
| do it in, but it is also _totally_ dependent on the editorial
| decisions of traditional media and publishing).
| stale2002 wrote:
| If those people don't sell their content, other publishers will
| and they will lose out anyway.
|
| Each individual publisher isn't needed. There is lots of
| training data in the world. So you can either get a payday or
| get nothing.
| andy99 wrote:
| https://archive.md/x0zn7
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