Millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it, the lawsuit said.
Digital computer-aided plagiarism is new ground for copyright. Google has successfully defended Google Books with the defense that it is searching an archive of legally purchased and licensed books for specific information without reproducing the entire work. It’s the equivalent of visiting a physical library or bookstore and flipping through a book without actually purchasing it.
AI is something else entirely. It’s more like a program that incorporates ALL of the text (training data) and alters it according to an algorithm. This has been a problem with news-crawling websites for a long time. They would download copywritten text, edit multiple sources together, or use an algorithm to replace common words, etc., then post it on their own ad (and often virus) filled sites. It seems like AI is just a more sophisticated version of that. In any case, I’m not a lawyer so who knows what the argument will be on one side or the other.
I’m glad you bring up Google Books in this. Those lawsuits in the early teens about this issue are really important. But two things bother me: Google really won the case, but then basically abandoned the project. It’s still there, but a shell of what it used to be. I wonder if the case may be, even though they won, they really lost. Or it could be Google just abandoning another project because they never cared about it.
I think AI for searching books like Google books would be an a amazing use case, and really, it is t that much different than what Google books is: an index of all of the published words. In fact, I can imagine AI being able to help you figure out if this book has the info you actually need from the book. That’s not what GPT is, but one could make one that could do it.
I am torn. I am sort of a GPT may sayer, but on the other hand, is it really all that philosophically different than what humans do? I don’t think it is materially different, but it is a little.
I like this opinion: https://nyti.ms/3RGq2Iq#permid=130059838
Edit: I am referring to Bens reply.
The thing is these are two separate arguments.
One is whether or not training is infringement.
The other is whether or not there needs to be stricter filters on output to avoid copyright.
The second one is easy to both argue for and implement, it just means funneling money towards a fine tuned RAG model to detect infringement before spitting out content. I’d expect we’ll be seeing that in the near future. It’s similar to the arguments YouTube was doomed at its acquisition because of rampant copyright infringement, but they just created a tagging system and now people complain about over-zealous DCMA enforcement - generative AI will end up in the same place with the same results for cloud-based models.
The first is much more murky, and I’m extremely skeptical that the suits regarding it will be successful given the degree of transformation and the relative scope of the material in any given suit compared to the total training set. As well the purpose of the laws in the first place were to encourage creation, and setting back arguably the most powerful creative tool in history (particularly when it means likely being eclipsed by other nation states with different attitudes towards IP) doesn’t seem all that encouraging.
If I were putting money on it, we’ll see multiple rulings against training as infringement which will settle the issue, but we will see “copyright detection as a service” models pretty much everywhere for a short period until suddenly the use of generative AI by creatives is so widespread that its being unable to be copyrighted means business models shift from media as a product to a service.
There is clearly value in a trained AI that an untrained model lacks, otherwise you could sell them as a product or service for the same price. That training has value, and price difference between a trained and untrained model is that value.
Because training has a value, the training material has value as well. You can’t commercially extract value from someone’s product to make your own product and sell it, unless you buy their product wholesale or through a license.
And it they argue that paying would be financially prohibitive to training, they admit that the training has financial value. It’d be cheap if the training material wasn’t valuable.
I see two likely paths here for the future, presuming the court rules in favor of the NYT. The first is that AI companies work out a deal with publishers and media companies to use their work while not breaking the bank. The second is that AI companies don’t change the training process, but they change their financial model – if the AI is free to the public, they aren’t making money off of anyone’s work. They’d have to charge for ads or something.
Spaceballs extracts almost all of its value from Star Wars without paying for it.
You absolutely can extract value from things when the way in which you do it is fair use.
Which is typically considered to be use that is transformative enough so as to not simply be derivative, or in the public interest.
And I think you’d have a very difficult time showing LLMs general use to be derivative of any specific part of the training data.
We’ll see soon, as these court cases resolve.
And if the cases find in favor of the plaintiffs, “not charging” isn’t going to work out. You can’t copy material and not charge for it and get away with it. If there’s prior law that training is infringement, it’s unlikely the decision will be worded so narrowly that similar cases against companies that don’t charge will be found not to be infringement.
Keep in mind one of the pending cases is against Meta, whose model is completely free to access and use.
Just want to say this is great food for thought. Its going to take me time to mull over it
I agree. Both your comments were exciting views to read. Thanks!
In a perfect world, yes, I think AIs can and should be trained on real world content, but if those AIs still don’t understand the nuances of attribution, paraphrasing, and plagiarism, then that’s still a problem that needs to be addressed.
What a joke. Oh okay, if the LLMs output can annotate where the snippets came from, then it’s totally cool.
The fuck are we doing? We’re really sleepwalking into a future where a few companies are able to slurp up the entire history of human creative thought, crunch some statistics about it with the help of severely underpaid Kenyans, and put a paywall around it, and that’s totally legal.
Every time I see an “AI” (these are not fucking AI, and yet we’re fucking doomed already) apologist, I always think of Peter Gibbons explaining the “fractions of a penny” scheme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZjCQ3T5yXo
“It becomes ours”
Are we really this dumb? Maybe we deserve the dystopia we’re building.
I get it. Can seem alarming, and I won’t argue here about training on copyrighted works.
a few companies are able to slurp up the entire history of human creative thought, crunch some statistics about it with the help of severely underpaid Kenyans, and put a paywall around it, and that’s totally legal.
If a few companies can slurp up our entire public domain history and profitably paywall useful products of it, have there still been moral failings?
We’re really sleepwalking into a future where a few companies are able to slurp up the entire history of human creative thought, crunch some statistics about it with the help of severely underpaid Kenyans, and put a paywall around it, and that’s totally legal.
That future already happened ten years ago when NYT lost its lawsuits against Google.
OpenAI need to be nuked for that, just as Microsoft need to get nuked for training CoPilot over GPL code.
I have to say it’s fun to watch. I’m bringing this up with my boss when he’s back because all fortune 500 companies are big on both products right now and from a technology perspective and a business edge with their competitors it makes sense.
For me I care more from a philosophical and moral perspective and I’m curious with our “AI Steering Committee” how seriously they’re taking into account the actions of these companies. Microsoft is one thing as they’re so embedded but OpenAI? How long does a company wanting to be perceived as “good” going to continue using ChatGPT?
I don’t have answers. Genuinely curious.
IMO, we may get anther AI winter if things blow out legally.
If we continue to run into issues with AI and copywrite laws maybe copywrite laws are the issue. Maybe our broken system is keeping us held back.
I’m sure that Wine decelopers would be thrilled to be allowed to use leaked Windows code. I have a funny feeling that Microsoft may object.
Those with the power want to keep the power. The pattern is consistent be it Microsoft, Paramount or John Grisham.
Now the question is, how do we abolish antiquated copywrite laws while also ensuring people are adequately compensated for what they create?
Off the top, Microsoft and Paramount don’t create. They’re not people. They shouldn’t be in the conversation and they have no rights (yes I know not reality but I believe this). John Grisham has a leg to stand on.
I don’t know what the solution is. I merely know the current solutions we have in place don’t work but we continue to use them because those in power are benefitting from it.
On the one hand it should be a copyright violation but if it is then Google search, and all search engines are too.
The only reason you can search for an article and get a hit is Google already read the page and copied it all to it’s internal servers where everything is indexed. So when you search, Google can look up the keywords and provide you a link.
If there was a bug in Google’s search engine like OpenAI’s, you could craft a query that would leak Google’s indexed data.
So all search engines are the same copyright violators as OpenAI. They take data from everyone and profit from it.(even if it is indirect or paying salaries)
This is how I understand it too.
Google is directing me to NYT, which make revenue for both parties. OpenAI does not direct me to the NYT, they try to replace them, this is a parasitic relation. If you hacked Google to pull the article from their cache, you will go to jail.
If you hacked Google to pull the article from their cache, you will go to jail.
Google has a “preview” button which shows the article without clicking the link.
Is crafting a query to show an article “hacking”? Does that make the OpenAI researcher who got chatgpt to show an article a hacker?
I think we see a different Google inteface, have no preview button. It vanished years ago.
It appears that NYT has an agreement with Google. They were a bad example.
The google search doesn’t summarize the article for me so I have no reason to ever visit the site though.
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Everyone going nuts over ai being trained on copyrighted works. No one cares about how Spotify launched with warez released mp3s.
Good luck bro, next go after Facebook and Stability.AI and Mixtral and… Uhh
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