Technology

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.

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.

Machines aren’t people and it’s fine and reasonable to have different standards for each.

LLMs cannot learn or create like humans, and even if they somehow could, they are not humans. So the comparison to human creators expounding upon a genre is false because the premises on which it is based are false.

Perhaps you could compare it to a student getting blackout drunk, copying Wikipedia articles and pasting them together, using a thesaurus app to change a few words here and there... And in the end, the student doesn't know what they created, has no recollection of the sources they used, and the teacher can't detect whether it's plagiarized or who from.

OpenAI made a mistake by taking data without consent, not just from big companies but from individuals who are too small to fight back. Regurgitating information without attribution is gross in every regard, because even if you don't believe in asking for consent before taking from someone else, you should probably ask for a source before using this regurgitated information.

It doesn't work that way. Copyright law does not concern itself with learning. There are 2 things which allow learning.

For one, no one can own facts and ideas. You can write your own history book, taking facts (but not copying text) from other history books. Eventually, that's the only way history books get written (by taking facts from previous writings). Or you can take the idea of a superhero and make your own, which is obviously where virtually all of them come from.

Second, you are generally allowed to make copies for your personal use. For example, you may copy audio files so that you have a copy on each of your devices. Or to tie in with the previous examples: You can (usually) make copies for use as reference, for historical facts or as a help in drawing your own superhero.

In the main, these lawsuits won't go anywhere. I don't want to guarantee that none of the relative side issues will be found to have merit, but basically this is all nonsense.

But you don't understand, he wants it to be true!

Only if the end result of that training is also something public. OpenAI shouldn't be making money on anything except ads if they're using copyright material without paying for it.

They have copyright over their article text, but they don't have copyright over rewordings of their articles.

It doesn't seem so cut and dry to me, because "someone read my article, and then I asked them to write an article on the same topic, and for each part that was different I asked them to change it until it was the same" doesn't feel like infringement to me.

I suppose I want to see the actual prompts to have a better idea.

I hate copyright too, and I agree you shouldn't own ideas, but the library of babel is a pretty weak refutation of it.

It's an algorithm that can generate all possible text, then search for where that text would appear, then show you that location. So you say that text existed long before they typed it, but was it ever accessed? The answer is no on a level of certainty beyond the strongest cryptography. That string has never been accessed, and thus never generated until you searched for it, so in a sense it never did exist before now.

The library of babel doesn't contain meaningful information because you have to independently think of the string you want it to generate before it will generate it for you. It must be curated, and all creation is ultimately the product of curation. What you have there is an extremely inefficient method of string storage and retrieval. It is no more capable of giving you meaningful output than a blank text file.

A better argument against copyright is just that it mostly gets used by large companies to hoard IP and keep most of the rewards and pay actual artists almost nothing. If the idea is to ensure art gets created and artists get paid, it has failed, because artists get shafted and the industry makes homogeneous, market driven slop, and Disney is monopolising all of it. Copyright is the mechanism by which that happened.