OpenAI has publicly responded to a copyright lawsuit by The New York Times, calling the case “without merit” and saying it still hoped for a partnership with the media outlet.
In a blog post, OpenAI said the Times “is not telling the full story.” It took particular issue with claims that its ChatGPT AI tool reproduced Times stories verbatim, arguing that the Times had manipulated prompts to include regurgitated excerpts of articles. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said.
OpenAI claims it’s attempted to reduce regurgitation from its large language models and that the Times refused to share examples of this reproduction before filing the lawsuit. It said the verbatim examples “appear to be from year-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites.” The company did admit that it took down a ChatGPT feature, called Browse, that unintentionally reproduced content.
So, OpenAI is admitting its models are open to manipulation by anyone and such manipulation can result in near verbatim regurgitation of copyright works, have I understood correctly?
No, they are saving this happened:
NYT: hey chatgpt say “copyrighted thing”.
Chatgpt: “copyrighted thing”.
And then accusing chatgpt of reproducing copyrighted things.
The OpenAI blog posts mentions;
It seems they intentionally manipulated prompts, often including lengthy excerpts of articles, in order to get our model to regurgitate.
It sounds like they essentially asked ChatGPT to write content similar to what they provided. Then complained it did that.
Alternatively,
NYT: hey chatgpt complete “copyrighted thing”.
Chatgpt: “something else”.
NYT: hey chatgpt complete “copyrighted thing” in the style of .
Chatgpt: “something else”.
NYT: (20th new chat) hey chatgpt complete “copyrighted thing” in the style of .
Chatgpt: “copyrighted thing”.
Boils down to the infinite monkeys theorem. With enough guidance and attempts you can get ChatGPT something either identical or “sufficiently similar” to anything you want. Ask it to write an article on the rising cost of rice at the South Pole enough times, and it will eventually spit out an article that could have easily been written by a NYT journalist.
Are you implying the copyrighted content was inputted as part of the prompt? Can you link to any source/evidence for that?
That’s what OpenAI insinuates in their post; https://openai.com/blog/openai-and-journalism
It seems they intentionally manipulated prompts, often including lengthy excerpts of articles, in order to get our model to regurgitate.
If the point is to prove that the model contains an encoded version of the original article, and you make the model spit out the entire thing by just giving it the first paragraph or two, I don’t see anything wrong with such a proof.
Your previous comment was suggesting that the entire article (or most of it) was included in the prompt/context, and that the part generated purely by the model was somehow generic enough that it could have feasibly been created without having an encoded/compressed/whatever version of the entire article somewhere.
Which does not appear to be the case.
Not quite.
They’re alleging that if you tell it to include a phrase in the prompt, that it will try to, and that what NYT did was akin to asking it to write an article on a topic using certain specific phrases, and then using the presence of those phrases to claim it’s infringing.
Without the actual prompts being shared, it’s hard to gauge how credible the claim is.
If they seeded it with one sentence and got a 99% copy, that’s not great.
If they had to give it nearly an entire article and it only matched most of what they gave it, that seems like much less of an issue.
The problem is not that it’s regurgitating. The problem is that it was trained on NYT articles and other data in violation of copyright law. Regurgitation is just evidence of that.
Its not clear that training on copyrighted material is in breach of copyright. It is clear that regurgitating copyrighted material is in breach of copyright.
Sure but who is at fault?
If I manually type an entire New York Times article into this comment box, and Lemmy distributes it all over the internet… that’s clearly a breach of copyright. But are the developers of the open source Lemmy Software liable for that breach? Of course not. I would be liable.
Obviously Lemmy should (and does) take reasonable steps (such as defederation) to help manage illegal use… but that’s the extent of their liability.
All NYT needed to do was show OpenAI how they go the AI to output that content, and I’d expect OpenAI to proactively find a solution. I don’t think the courts will look kindly on NYT’s refusal to collaborate and find some way to resolve this without a lawsuit. A friend of mine tried to settle a case once, but the other side refused and it went all the way to court. The court found that my friend had been in the wrong (as he freely admitted all along) but also made them pay my friend compensation for legal costs (including just time spent gathering evidence). In the end, my friend got the outcome he was hoping for and the guy who “won” the lawsuit lost close to a million dollars.
They might look down upon that but I doubt they’ll rule against NYT entirely. The AI isn’t a separate agent from OpenAI either. If the AI infringes on copyright, then so does OpenAI.
Copyright applies to reproduction of a work so if they build any machine that is capable of doing that (they did) then they are liable for it.
Seems like the solution here is to train data to not output copyrighted works and to maybe train a sub-system to detect it and stop the main chatbot from responding with it.
Copyright applies to reproduction of a work so if they build any machine that is capable of doing that (they did) then they are liable for it.
That is for sure not the case. The modern world is bursting with machines capable of reproducing copyrighted works, and their manufacturers are not liable for copyright violations carried out by users of those machines. You’re using at least once of those machines to read this comment. This stuff was decided around the time VCRs were invented.
Sorry, the unlicensed reproduction of those works via machine. Missed a word but it’s important. Most machines do not reproduce works in unlicensed ways, especially not by themselves. Then we talk users. Yes, if a user utilizes a machine to reproduce a work, it’s on the user. However, the machine doesn’t usually produce the copyrighted work itself because that production is illegal. For VCR, it’s fine to make a tv recorder because the VCR itself doesn’t violate copyright, the user does via its inputs. If the NYT input its own material and then received it, obviously fine. If it didn’t though, that’s illegal reproduction.
So here I expect the court will say that OpenAI has no right to reproduce the work in full or in amounts not covered by fair use and must take measures to prevent the reproduction of irrelevant portions of articles. However, they’ll likely be able to train their AI off of publicly available data so long as they don’t violate anyone’s TOS.
There hasn’t been a court ruling in the US that makes training a model on copyrighted data any sort of violation. Regurgitating exact content is a clear copyright violation, but simply using the original content/media in a model has not been ruled a breach of copyright (yet).
True. I fully expect that the court will rule against OpenAI here, because it very obviously does not meet any fair use exemption.
For that to work, NYT has to prove OpenAI is copying their words verbatim, not just their style.
If the AI isn’t outputting a string of words that can be found on an NYT article, they don’t stand a chance
And I suppose people at OpenAI understand how to build a formal proof and that it is one. So it’s straight up dishonest.
Only publishing it is a copyright issue. You can also obtain copyrighted material with a web browser. The onus is on the person who publishes any material they put together, regardless of source. OpenAI is not responsible for publishing just because their tool was used to obtain the material.
There are issues other than publishing, but that’s the biggest one. But they are not acting merely as a conduit for the work, they are ingesting it and deriving new work from it. The use of the copyrighted work is integral to their product, which makes it a big deal.
Yeah, the ingestion part is still to be determined legally, but I think OpenAI will be ok. NYT produces content to be read, and copyright only protects them from people republishing their content. People also ingest their content and can make derivative works without problem. OpenAI are just doing the same, but at a level of ability that could be disruptive to some companies. This isn’t even really very harmful to the NYT, since the historical material used doesn’t even conflict with their primary purpose of producing new news. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out though.
copyright only protects them from people republishing their content
This is not correct. Copyright protects reproduction, derivation, distribution, performance, and display of a work.
People also ingest their content and can make derivative works without problem. OpenAI are just doing the same, but at a level of ability that could be disruptive to some companies.
Yes, you can legally make derivative works, but without license, it has to be fair use. In this case, where not only did they use one whole work in its entirety, they likely scraped thousands of whole NYT articles.
This isn’t even really very harmful to the NYT, since the historical material used doesn’t even conflict with their primary purpose of producing new news.
This isn’t necessarily correct either. I assume they sell access to their archives, for research or whatever. Being able to retrieve articles verbatim through chatgpt does harm their business.
Yes, you can legally make derivative works, but without license, it has to be fair use. In this case, where not only did they use one whole work in its entirety, they likely scraped thousands of whole NYT articles.
Scraping is the same as reading, not reproducing. That isn’t a copyright violation.
deleted by creator
I’m gonna have to press X to doubt that, OpenAI.
New York Times has an extremely bad reputation lately. It’s basically a tabloid these days, so it’s possible.
It’s weird that they didn’t share the full conversation. I thought they provided evidence for the claim in the form of the full conversation of instead of their classic “trust me bro, the Ai really said it, no I don’t want to share the evidence.”
Oh please, NYTimes is still one of the premier papers out there. There are mistakes but they’re no where near a tabloid, and they DO actually go out of their way to update and correct articles … to the point I’m pretty sure I’ve even seen them use push notifications for corrections.
Unless of course that is, you want to listen to Trump and his deluge of alternative facts…
I’m pretty sure I’ve even seen them use push notifications for corrections.
They have, I distinctly remember them doing that a few times.
Glad that wasn’t just a fever dream
Yeah premier coverage of Taylor Swift being secretly gay. NYT is legitimately a tabloid now…
That was an opinion piece… Certainly not premier coverage.
Their opinion pieces have been full of garbage opinions for years. Didn’t the NYT get bought recently? I can’t seem to find reference to it though.
The whole point of opinion pieces is to expose opinions that are outside of the realm of what you’d normally publish. It’s supposed to be a means for keeping your readers out of their echo chamber/exposing different view points.
The times AFAIK didn’t get bought but Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, perhaps that’s what you’re thinking of.
Yeah that must be it. And thank you that is good perspective. To ask a dumb question, at what point can we decide not to care about other side opinions? Climate change for instance, I don’t need to see another opinion saying that it isn’t bad and the science is wrong, that is pretty much settled.
And OpenAI hasn’t exactly been open since GPT-3.
OpenAI claims that the NYT articles were wearing provocative clothing.
Feels like the same awful defense.
If you can prompt it, “Write a book about Harry Potter” and get a book about a boy wizard back, that’s almost certainly legally wrong. If you prompt it with 90% of an article, and it writes a pretty similar final 10%… not so much. Until full conversations are available, I don’t really trust either of these parties, especially in the context of a lawsuit.
So I copied the first paragraph of the Osama Bin Laden Killed NYT Article and asked Chat GPT to give me an article on the topic “in the style of NYT”
Even before the thing had finished generating, it was clear to me that it was high school level “copy my homework but don’t make it obvious” work.
I put it into a plagiarism checker anyway and it said “Significant Plagiarism Found”
Here’s the chatGPT text for anyone who is interested-
WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the most devastating attack on American soil in modern times and the most hunted man in the world, was killed in a firefight with United States forces in Pakistan, President Obama announced on Sunday.
In a late-night address to the nation from the East Room of the White House, President Obama declared, “Justice has been done.” The death of Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader who had eluded international forces for nearly a decade, marks a significant turning point in the global fight against terrorism and a pivotal victory for U.S. intelligence and military forces.
Bin Laden’s demise, the result of an operation that unfolded over the course of a few tense hours, is being hailed as a triumph of U.S. military and intelligence efforts. The operation, carried out by a small team of American forces in Abbottabad, a city north of Islamabad, ended a worldwide manhunt that began in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001.
The President, in his address, detailed how the United States had received an intelligence lead last August about Bin Laden’s possible location. Over the ensuing months, intelligence officials worked to confirm the information. “Finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice,” Obama said.
The raid on Bin Laden’s compound, described by officials as a surgical strike, was a high-stakes operation. U.S. helicopters ferried elite counter-terrorism forces into the compound, where they engaged in a firefight, killing Bin Laden and several of his associates. There were no American casualties.
The news of Bin Laden’s death immediately sent waves of emotion across the United States and around the world. In Washington, large crowds gathered outside the White House, chanting “USA! USA!” as they celebrated the news. Similar scenes unfolded in New York City, particularly at Ground Zero, where the Twin Towers once stood.
The killing of Bin Laden, however, does not signify the end of Al Qaeda or the threat it poses. U.S. officials have cautioned that the organization, though weakened, still has the capability to carry out attacks. The Department of Homeland Security has issued alerts, warning of the potential for retaliatory strikes by terrorists.
In his address, President Obama acknowledged the continuing threat but emphasized that Bin Laden’s death was a message to the world. “The United States has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done,” he said.
As the world reacts to the news of Bin Laden’s death, questions are emerging about Pakistan’s role and what it knew about the terrorist leader’s presence in its territory. The operation’s success also underscores the capabilities and resilience of the U.S. military and intelligence community after years of relentless pursuit.
Osama bin Laden’s death marks the end of a chapter in the global war on terror, but the story is far from over. As the United States and its allies continue to confront the evolving threat of terrorism, the world watches and waits to see what unfolds in this ongoing narrative.
Ok but you didn’t put this up with the original article text or compare it in any way. Just ran it through a ‘plagiarism detector’ and dumped the text you made. If you’re going to make this argument, don’t rely on a single website to check your text, and at least compare it to the original article you’re using to make your point. It looks like you’re dumping it here and expecting we all are going to go Scooby-Doo detectives or something. Mate, this is your own argument. Do the work yourself if you want to make a point.
Hey, I get what you are trying to say, but I suggest you try reading the original article. Here it is for reference.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/asia/osama-bin-laden-is-killed.html
The second para starts in the original article by saying - In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done”
In the ChatGPT version it says - In a late-night address to the nation from the East Room, President Obama declared “Justice has been done”.
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions
One thing that seems dumb about the NYT case that I haven’t seen much talk about is that they argue that ChatGPT is a competitor and it’s use of copyrighted work will take away NYTs business. This is one of the elements they need on their side to counter OpenAIs fiar use defense. But it just strikes me as dumb on its face. You go to the NYT to find out what’s happening right now, in the present. You don’t go to the NYT to find general information about the past or fixed concepts. You use ChatGPT the opposite way, it can tell you about the past (accuracy aside) and it can tell you about general concepts, but it can’t tell you about what’s going on in the present (except by doing a web search, which my understanding is not a part of this lawsuit). I feel pretty confident in saying that there’s not one human on earth that was a regular new York times reader who said “well i don’t need this anymore since now I have ChatGPT”. The use cases just do not overlap at all.
Whether or not they “instructed the model to regurgitate” articles, the fact is it did so, which is still copyright infringement either way.
No, not really. If you use photop to recreate a copyrighted artwork, who is infringing the copyright you or Adobe?
You are. The person who made or sold a gun isn’t liable for the murder of the person that got shot.
The difference is that ChatGPT is not Photoshop. Photoshop is a tool that a person controls absolutely. ChatGPT is “artificial intelligence”, it does its own “thinking”, it interprets the instructions a user gives it.
Copyright infringement is decided on based on the similarity of the work. That is the established method. That method would be applied here.
OpenAI infringe copyright twice. First, on their training dataset, which they claim is “research” - it is in fact development of a commercial product. Second, their commercial product infringes copyright by producing near-identical work. Even though its dataset doesn’t include the full work of Harry Potter, it still manages to write Harry Potter. If a human did the same thing, even if they honestly and genuinely thought they were presenting original ideas, they would still be guilty. This is no different.
it still manages to write Harry Potter. If a human did the same thing, even if they honestly and genuinely thought they were presenting original ideas, they would still be guilty.
Only if they publish or sell it. Which is why OpenAI isnt/shouldn’t be liable in this case.
If you write out the entire Harry Potter series from memory, you are not breaking any laws just by doing so. Same as if you use photoshop to reproduce a copyright work.
So because they publish the tool, not the actual content openAI isn’t breaking any laws either. It’s much the same way that torrent engines are legal despite what they are used for.
There is also some more direct president for this. There is a website called “library of babel” that has used some clever maths to publish every combination of characters up to 3260 characters long. Which contains, by definition, anything below that limit that is copywritten, and in theory you could piece together the entire Harry Potter series from that website 3k characters at a time. And that is safe under copywrite law.
The same with making a program that generates digital pictures where all the pixels are set randomly. That program, if given enough time /luck will be capable of generating any copyright image, can generate photos of sensitive documents or nudes of celebrities, but is also protected by copyright law, regardless of how closely the products match the copyright material. If the person using the program publishes those pictures, that a different story, much like someone publishing a NYT article generated by GPT would be liable.
Only if they publish or sell it. Which is why OpenAI isnt/shouldn’t be liable in this case.
If you write out the entire Harry Potter series from memory, you are not breaking any laws just by doing so. Same as if you use photoshop to reproduce a copyright work.
Actually you are infringing copyright. It’s just that a) catching you is very unlikely, and b) there are no damages to make it worthwhile.
You don’t have to be selling things to infringe copyright. Selling makes it worse, and makes it easier to show damages (loss of income), but it isn’t a requirement. Copyright is absolute, if I write something and you copy it you are infringing on my absolute right to dictate how my work is copied.
In any case, OpenAI publishes its answers to whoever is using ChatGPT. If someone asks it something and it spits out someone else’s work, that’s copyright infringement.
There is also some more direct president for this. There is a website called “library of babel” that has used some clever maths to publish every combination of characters up to 3260 characters long. Which contains, by definition, anything below that limit that is copywritten, and in theory you could piece together the entire Harry Potter series from that website 3k characters at a time. And that is safe under copywrite law.
It isn’t safe, it’s just not been legally tested. Just because no one has sued for copyright infringement doesn’t mean no infringement has occurred.
Actually you are infringing copyright.
No I can absolutely 1,000% guarantee you that this isnt true and you’re pulling that from your ass.
I have had to go through a high profile copyright claim for my work where this was the exact premise. We were developing a game and were using copyrighted images as placeholders while we worked on the game internally, we presented the game to the company as a pitch and they tried to sue us for using their assets.
And they failed mostly because one of the main factors for establishing a copyright claim is if the reproduced work affects the market for the original. Then because we were using the assets in a unique way, it was determined we using them in a transformative way. And it was made for a pitch, no for the purpose of selling, so was determined to be covered by fair use.
The EU also has the “personal use” exemption, which specifically allows for copying for personal use.
In any case, OpenAI publishes its answers to whoever is using ChatGPT.
No theyre not, chat GPT sessions are private, so if the results are shared the onus is with the user, not OpenAI.
Just because no one has sued for copyright infringement doesn’t mean no infringement has occurred.
I mean, it kinda does? technically? Because if you fail to enforce your copyright then you cant claim copyright later on.
I have had to go through a high profile copyright claim for my work where this was the exact premise. We were developing a game and were using copyrighted images as placeholders while we worked on the game internally, we presented the game to the company as a pitch and they tried to sue us for using their assets.
That’s interesting, if only because the judgement flies in the face of the actual legislation. I guess some judges don’t really understand it much better than your average layman (there was always a huge amount of confusion over what “transformative” meant in terms of copyright infringement, for a similar example).
I can only rationalise that your test version could be considered as “research”, thus giving you some fair use exemption. The placeholder graphics were only used as an internal placeholder, and thus there was never any intent to infringe on copyright.
ChatGPT is inherently different, as you can specifically instruct it to infringe on copright. “Write a story like Harry Potter” or “write an article in the style of the New York Times” is basically giving that instruction, and if what it outputs is significantly similar (or indeed identical) then it is quite reasonable to assume copyright has been infringed.
A key difference here is that, while it is “in private” between the user and ChatGPT, those are still two different parties. When you wrote your temporary code, that was just internal between workers of your employer - the material is only shared to one party, your employer, which encompases multiple people (who are each employed or contracted by a single entity). ChatGPT works with two parties, OpenAI and the user, thus everything ChatGPT produces is published - even if it is only published to an individual user, that user is still a separate party to the copyright infringer.
I mean, it kinda does? technically? Because if you fail to enforce your copyright then you cant claim copyright later on.
If a person robs a bank, but is not caught, are they not still a bank robber?
While calling someone who hasn’t been convicted of a crime a criminal might open you up to liability, and as such in practice a professional journalist will avoid such concrete labels as a matter of professional integrity, that does not mean such a statement is false. Indeed, it is entirely possible for me to call someone a bank robber and prove that this was a valid statement in a defamation lawsuit, even if they were exonerated in criminal court. Crimes have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, ie greater than 99% certain, while civil court works on the balance of probabilities, ie which argument is more than 50% true.
I can say that it is more than 50% likely that copyright infringement has occurred even if no criminal copyright infringement is proven.
That isn’t pulled from my ass, that’s just the nuance of how law works. And that’s before we delve into the topic of which judge you had, what legal training they undertook and how much vodka was in the “glass of water” on their bench, or even which way the wind blew that day.
According to the Federal legislation, it does not matter whether or not the copying was for commercial or non-commercial purposes, the only thing that matters is the copying itself. Your judge got it wrong, and you were very lucky in that regard - in particular that your case was not appealed further to a higher, more competent court.
Commerciality should only be factored in to a circumstance of fair use, per the legislation, which a lower court judge cannot overrule. If your case were used as case law in another trial, there’s a good chance it would be disregarded.
I guess some judges don’t really understand it much better than your average layman
“Am I wrong about this subject? No it must be the legal professionals who are wrong!”
im done with this. Goodbye.
Presses X to doubt
This is the best summary I could come up with:
OpenAI has publicly responded to a copyright lawsuit by The New York Times, calling the case “without merit” and saying it still hoped for a partnership with the media outlet.
OpenAI claims it’s attempted to reduce regurgitation from its large language models and that the Times refused to share examples of this reproduction before filing the lawsuit.
It said the verbatim examples “appear to be from year-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites.” The company did admit that it took down a ChatGPT feature, called Browse, that unintentionally reproduced content.
However, the company maintained its long-standing position that in order for AI models to learn and solve new problems, they need access to “the enormous aggregate of human knowledge.” It reiterated that while it respects the legal right to own copyrighted works — and has offered opt-outs to training data inclusion — it believes training AI models with data from the internet falls under fair use rules that allow for repurposing copyrighted works.
The company announced website owners could start blocking its web crawlers from accessing their data on August 2023, nearly a year after it launched ChatGPT.
The company recently made a similar argument to the UK House of Lords, claiming no AI system like ChatGPT can be built without access to copyrighted content.
The original article contains 364 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 40%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Tricked. Lol. The NYT tricked a private company into stealing it’s content. True distopia.
Basic reading comprehension, man. That’s not what they’re claiming.
NYT are such lawsuit trolls I could imagine this is credible.
Christ this is a boring fucking debate. One side thinks companies like OpenAI are obviously stealing and feels no need to justify their position, instead painting anyone who disagrees as pro-theft.
What a silly and misuided lawsuit.
The advances in LLMs and Diffusion models over the past couple of years are remarkable technological achievements that should be celebrated. We shouldn’t be stifling scientific progress in the name of protecting intellectual property, we should be keen to develop the next generation of systems that mitigate hallucination and achieve new capabilities, such as is proposed in Yann Lecun’s Autonomous Machine Intelligence concept.
I can sorta sympathise with those whose work is “stolen” for use as training data, but really whatever you put online in any form is fair game to be consumed by any kind of crawler or surveillance system, so if you don’t want that then don’t put your shit in the street. This “right” to be omitted from training datasets directly conflicts with our ability to progress a new frontier of science.
The actual problem is that all this work is undertaken by a cartel of companies with a stranglehold on compute power and resources to crawl and clean all that data. As with all natural monopolies (transportation, utilities, etc.) it should be undertaken for the public good, in such as way that we can all benefit from the profits.
And the millionth argument quibbling about whether LLMs are “truly intelligent” is a totally orthogonal philosophical tangent.
I understand your point, but disagree.
We tend to think of these models as agents or persons with a right to information. They “learn like we do” after all. I think the right way to see them is emulating machines.
A company buys an empty emulating machine and then puts in the type of information is would like to emulate or copy. Copyright prevents companies from doing this in the classic sense of direct emulation already.
LLM companies are trying to push the view that their emulating machines are different enough from previous methods of copying that they should be immune to copyright. They tend to also claim that their emulating machines are in some way learning rather than emulating, but this is tenuous at best and has not yet been proven in a meaningful sense.
I think you’ll see that if you only feed an LLM art or text from only one artist you will find that most of the output of the LLM is clearly copyright infringement if you tried to use it commercially. I personally don’t buy the argument that just because you’re mixing several artists or writers that it’s suddenly not infringement.
As far as science and progress, I don’t think that’s hampered by the view that these companies are clearly infringing on copyright. Copyright already has several relevant exemptions for educational and private use.
As far as “it’s on the internet, it’s fair game”. I don’t agree. In Western countries your works are still protected by copyright. Most of us do give away those rights when we post on most platforms, but only to one entity, not anyone/ any company who can read or has internet access.
I personally think IP laws as they are hold us back significantly. Using copyright against LLMs is one of the first modern cases where I think it will protect society rather than hold us back. We can’t just give up all our works and all our ideas to a handful of companies to copy for profit just because they can read and view them and feed them en masse into their expensive emulating machines.
We need to keep the right to profit from our personal expression. LLMs and other AI as they currently exist are a direct threat to our right to benefit from our personal expression.
We tend to think of these models as agents or persons with a right to information. They “learn like we do” after all.
This is again a similar philosophical tangent that’s not germane to the issue at hand (albeit an interesting one).
I think you’ll see that if you only feed an LLM art or text from only one artist you will find that most of the output of the LLM is clearly copyright infringement if you tried to use it commercially.
This is not a feasible proposition in any practical sense. LLMs are necessarily trained on VAST datasets that comprise all kinds of text. The only type of network that could be trained on only one artist’s corpus is a tiny pedagogical tool like Karpathy’s minGPT https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT, trained solely on the works of Shakespeare. But this is not a “Large” language model, it’s a teaching exercise for ML students. One artist’s work could never practically train a network that could be considered “Large” in the sense of LLMs. So it’s pointless to prevaricate on a contrived scenario like that.
In more practical terms, it’s not controversial to state that deep networks with lots of degrees of freedom are capable of overfitting and memorizing training data. However, if they have other additional capabilities besides memorization then this may be considered an acceptable price to pay for those additional capabilities. It’s trivial to demonstrate that chatbots can perform novel tasks, like writing a rap song about Spongebob going to the moon on a rocket powered by ice cream - which is surely not existent in any training data, yet any contemporary chatbot is able to produce.
As far as science and progress, I don’t think that’s hampered by the view that these companies are clearly infringing on copyright.
As an example, one open research question concerns the scaling relationships of network performance as dataset size increases. In this sense, any attempt to restrict the pool of available training data hampers our ability to probe this question. You may decide that this is worth it to prioritize the sanctity of copyright law, but you can’t pretend that it’s not impeding that particular research question.
As far as “it’s on the internet, it’s fair game”. I don’t agree. In Western countries your works are still protected by copyright. Most of us do give away those rights when we post on most platforms, but only to one entity, not anyone/ any company who can read or has internet access.
I wasn’t making a claim about law, but about ethics. I believe it should be fair game, perhaps not for private profiteering, but for research. Also this says nothing of adversary nations that don’t respect our copyright principles, but that’s a whole can of worms.
We can’t just give up all our works and all our ideas to a handful of companies to copy for profit just because they can read and view them and feed them en masse into their expensive emulating machines.
As already stated, that’s where I was in agreement with you - It SHOULDN’T be given up to a handful of companies. But instead it SHOULD be given up to public research institutes for the furtherance of science. And whatever you don’t want to be included you should refrain from posting. (Or perhaps, if this research were undertaken according to transparent FOSS principles, the curated datasets would be public and open, and you could submit the relevant GDPR requests to get your personal information expunged if you wanted.)
Your whole response is framed in terms of LLMs being purely a product for commercial entities, who shadily exaggerate the learning capabilities of their systems, and couches the topic as a “people vs. corpos” battle. But web-scraped datasets (such as Imagenet) have been powering deep learning research for over a decade, long before AI captured the public imagination the way it has currently, and long before it became a big money spinner. This view neglects that language modelling, image recognition, speech transcription, etc. are also ongoing fields of academic research. Instead of vainly trying to cram the cat back into the bag, and throttling research, we should be embracing the use of publicly available data, with legislation that ensures it’s used for public benefit.
