The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work
The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work
Millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it, the lawsuit said.
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.
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)
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.
FYI The Times is different than The New York Times
Everyone going nuts over ai being trained on copyrighted works. No one cares about how Spotify launched with warez released mp3s.
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.
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.
Good luck bro, next go after Facebook and Stability.AI and Mixtral and.... Uhh
The existing industry that's popped up around LLMs has conveniently ignored that what these models are doing may have been illegal the whole time and a lot of the experts knew it. This is why it's so important for folks to realize that the industry is not just thin wrappers around ChatGPT (and that interesting applications of this technology are largely being pushed out by the lowest hanging fruit). If this is ruled as not fair use then the whole industry will basically disappear overnight and we'll have to rebuild it from scratch either with a new business model that pays authors or as open source/crowd sourced models (probably both). All that said we're almost certainly better off. Open AI may have kicked off the most recent "gold rush" but their methods have been terrible for both the industry at large and for further development of the tech.
It always should have had the right business model where they paid for this access for AI training. They knew it was wrong but in their rush to be known they decided it was better to take without asking and then ask for forgiveness later. Regardless what happens now, people have already made a name for themselves swindling the likes of Microsoft out of it and will have long well-paying careers from it.
It seems like it was almost necessary to go through this phase for the sake of developing the tech. Doesn't a lot of CS research uses web crawling algorithms to gather data without identifying that the information is licensed for such use? What about the fediverse? it remains unclear what the copyright and licensing will be should it come into question. There is no EULA to access fedi, just a set of open protocols.
I seem to remember NYT suing Google years ago for effectively the same thing. Google copies all NYT articles into it's index, then sells ads for people to search for that copyrighted information.
This is a fair point with regards to a handful of companies (Microsoft, Google, Meta) but there will still be an immediate loss in quality as they go back to basics on their data pipelines. Given how long they've spent playing catch up in this space, I suspect progress will be pretty slow from there
This is cute naiveté. This case will drag on for years and eventually be settled behind closed doors.
These models can still be trained on data that they're allowed to use, but I think that what we're seeing is that the better LLM services are probably trained with shocking amounts of private data, whereas the less performant probably don't use stolen data.
Textbooks are a big one that I suspect we'll probably see a set of suits over. Particularly because they seem to be some of the most valuable training data.
It certainly seems illegal, but if it is, then all search engines are too. They do the same thing. Search engines copy everything to their internal servers, index it, then sell access to that copyrighted data (via ads and other indirect revenue generators).
Definitely not. Search engines point you to the original and aren't by any means selling access. That is the resources are accessible without using a search engine. LLMs are different because they do fold the inputs into the final product in a way that makes accessing the original material impossible. What's more LLMs can fully reproduce copyrighted works and will try to pass them off as it's own work.
If the companies can profit of stealing work and charging access for it, why can't I just pirate it myself without making anyone richer?
Why would the NYT pay the authors again?
I don't see why we would be better off if the NYT and other newspapers get a windfall profit. I don't see the reasoning here at all.
ETA: 6 downvotes so far. Would anyone mind explaining what the problem is? I'm not lying when I say that I don't see it.
The NYT as a company is much closer to its authors than AI is to its authors. When it exercises copyright, the owners of those copyrights are the NYT, but the authors are the ... Well, authors. You're right that a victory means newspapers get a lot more money.
... But would that be a bad thing? If newspapers become more profitable again, maybe we can see a resurgence of local papers and more reliable news. Instead of MSNBC and Fox and CNN, various papers could be our main media sources.
In any case -- there's times when business interests align with employee interests, and this is one of them. The NYT is effectively saying with this lawsuit that OpenAI et al. have been stealing from them, and by proxy, the authors. A victory in this court case would strengthen author rights and ownership. A loss would mean big corporations can take anything made by the public, use it for their AI, and then charge money for it. The training materials have a quantifiable value in what a trained model sells for versus an untrained model.
Pretty sure you were downvoted because it looks like you've misunderstood. The NYT do, in fact, pay their authors.