A New York Times copyright lawsuit could kill OpenAI::A list of authors and entertainers are also suing the tech company for damages that could total in the billions.
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I always say this when this comes up because I really believe it’s the right solution - any generative AI built with unlicensed and/or public works should then be free for the public to use.
If they want to charge for access that’s fine but they should have to go about securing legal rights first. If that’s impossible, they should worry about profits some other way like maybe add-ons such as internet connected AI and so forth.
There’s plenty of money to be made providing infrastructure. Lots of companies make a ton of money providing infrastructure for open source projects.
On another note, why is open AI even called “open”?
On another note, why is open AI even called “open”?
It’s because of the implication…
Not really how it works these days. Look at Uber and Lime/Bird scooters. They basically would just show up to a city and say the hell with the law we are starting our business here. We just call it disruptive technology
Unfortunately true, and the long arm of the law, at least in the business world, isn’t really that long. Would love to see some monopoly busting to scare a few of these big companies into shape.
A very compelling solution! Allows a model of free use while providing an avenue for business to spend time developing it
Nice idea but how do you propose they pay for the billions of dollars it costs to train and then run said model?
Then don’t do it. Simple as that.
This is why we can’t have nice things
If we didn’t live under an economic system where creatives need to sell their works to make a living or even just survive, there wouldn’t be an issue. What OpenAI is doing is little different than any other worker exploitation, however. They are taking the fruits of the labor of others, without compensation of any kind, then using it to effectively destroy their livelihoods.
Few, if any, of the benefits of technological innovation related to LLMs or related tech is improving things for anyone but the already ultra-wealthy. That is the actual reason that we can’t have nice things; the greedy being obsessed with taking and taking while giving less than nothing back in return.
Just like noone is entitled to own a business that can’t afford to pay a living wage, OpenAI is not entitled to run a business aimed at building tools to destroy the livelihoods of countless thousands, if not millions, of creatives by building their tools out of stolen works.
I say this as one who is in support of trying to create actual AGI and potentially “uplift” species, making humanity less lonely. I think OpenAI doesn’t have what it takes and is nothing more than another scam to rob workers of the value of their labor.
This is the wrong way around. The NYT wants money for the use of its “intellectual property”. This is about money for property owners. When building rents go up, you wouldn’t expect construction workers to benefit, right?
In fact, more money for property owners means that workers lose out, because where else is the money going to come from? (well, “money”)
AI, like all previous forms of automation, allows us to produce more and better goods and services with the same amount of labor. On average, society becomes richer. Whether these gains should go to the rich, or be more evenly distributed, is a choice that we, as a society, make. It’s a matter of law, not technology.
The NYT lawsuit is about sending these gains to the rich. The NYT has already made its money from its articles. The authors were paid, in full, and will not get any more money. Giving money to these property owners will not make society any richer. It just moves wealth to property owners for being property owners. It’s about more money for the rich.
If OpenAI has to pay these property owners for no additional labor, then it will eventually have to increase subscription fees to balance the cash flow. People, who pay a subscription, probably feel that it benefits them, whether they use it for creative writing, programming, or entertainment. They must feel that the benefit is worth, at least, that much in terms of money.
So, the subscription fees represent a part of the gains to society. If a part of these subscription fees is paid to property owners, who did not contribute anything, then that means that this part of the social gains is funneled to property owners, IE mainly the ultra-rich, simply for being owners/ultra-rich.
This is the wrong way around. The NYT wants money for the use of its “intellectual property”. This is about money for property owners. When building rents go up, you wouldn’t expect construction workers to benefit, right?
I do not find that to be an apt analogy. This is more like someone setting up shop in the NYT’s lobby, stealing issues, and cutting them up to make their own newspaper that they sell from said lobby, without permission or compensation. OpenAI just refined a technology to parasitize off of others’ labor and is using it to seev rent over intellectual property that they don’t own or have rights to use.
So, the subscription fees represent a part of the gains to society. If a part of these subscription fees is paid to property owners, who did not contribute anything, then that means that this part of the social gains is funneled to property owners, IE mainly the ultra-rich, simply for being owners/ultra-rich.
I’m going to have to strongly disagree with here. The subscription fees are only going to the ultra-wealthy who are using LLMs to parasitize off of labor. The NYT is not who I’m worried about having their livelihoods destroyed, it’s the individual artists, actors, and creatives, as well as those whose jobs are being replaced with terrible chatbots that cannot actually do the work but are implemented anyway to drive lay-offs and boost stock prices. The NYT and other suits are merely a proxy due to the wealth gap leading to it being nearly impossible for those most impacted to successfully utilize the courts to remedy their situation.
I do not find that to be an apt analogy.
The point is that the people who create some property don’t get a cut when the property rises in value. You keep calling the intellectual property of the NYT labor. I think there’s something there you seriously misunderstand.
This is more like someone setting up shop in the NYT’s lobby, stealing issues, and cutting them up to make their own newspaper that they sell from said lobby, without permission or compensation.
That’s an analogy for a normal practice in journalism. Like when other news media (other websites, TV, radio, …) reports that on what the NYT reports. I’m sure you have seen articles where it said something like “The NYT reported that…”.
That’s not what the case is mainly about. I’m not sure if anything like that is even mentioned.
Yeah, Anarchy is such a good thing to teach AI, Kids and others…
Defending scamming as a business model is not a business model.
That goes against the fundamental idea of something being unlicensed, meaning there are no repercussions from using the content.
I think what you mean already exists: open source licenses. Some open source licenses stipulate that the material is free, can be modified, etc. and you can do whatever you want with it, but only on the condition that whatever you create is under the same open source license.
Ugh I see what you mean - no I mean unlicensed as in ‘they didn’t bother to license copyrighted works’ and public as in ‘stuff they scraped from Reddit, Twitter, and etc. without permission from anyone’.
Ah gotcha.
Running AI isn’t free, and AI calculations pollute like a motherfucker
This isn’t me saying you’re wrong on an ethical or judicial standpoint, because on those I agree. It’s just that, on a practical level considerations have to be made.
For me, those considerations alone (and a ton of other considerations such as digital slavery, child porn etc) make me just want to pull the plug already.
AI was fun. It’s a dumb idea for dumb buzzword spewing silicon valley ghouls. Pull the plug and be done with it.
The thing is that those models aren’t even open source, if it was then you could argue that openai’s business model is renting processing power. Except they’re not so their business model is effectively selling models trained on copyrighted data
Plus, they built the whole thing on the basis of “research purposes” when in reality from the very start they intended to use this as a business above all else. But tax benefits, copyright leniency etcetera were used liberally because ‘it’s just research’.
And then keeping it closed source. The whole thing is a typical silicon valley scam where they will use whatever they can get their grubby little hands on, and when the product is finally here, they make sure to throw it into the world with such a force that legislators can’t even respond adequately. That’s how they make sure that there will be no legislation on if the whole thing is even legal or ethical to begin with, but merely to keep it contained. From then on, they can just keep everything in courts indefinitely while the product festers like a cancer.
It’s the same thing with blockchains basically.
Also, again, digital slavery being used to ‘train’ models and child porn being used to train them because the web scrapers they used can’t and won’t discern whatever shit they rake up into the garbled pile of other people’s works.
What is unlicensed work? Copyrighted content will not have a licence agreement but this doesn’t mean you can freely infringe on copyright law.
Stuff lile public domain books, I guess, like alice in wonderland, and cc0 content
Right: public works are content in the public domain where the copyright has expired and Creative Commons licenced content is, well, licenced.
By unlicensed I mean works that haven’t been licensed IE anything being used without permission or some other right
Would you, after devoting full years of your adult life to the unpaid work of learning the requisite advanced math and computer science needed to develop such a model, like to spend years more of your life to develop a generative AI model without compensation? Within the US, it is legal to use public text for commercial purposes without any need to obtain a permit. Developers of such models deserve to be paid, just like any other workers, and that doesn’t happen unless either we make AI a utility (or something similar) and funnel tax dollars into it or the company charges for the product so it can pay its employees.
I wholeheartedly agree that AI shouldn’t be trained on copyrighted, private, or any other works outside of the public domain. I think that OpenAI’s use of nonpublic material was illegal and unethical, and that they should be legally obligated to scrap their entire model and train another one from legal material. But developers deserve to be paid for their labor and time, and that requires the company that employs them to make money somehow.
Would you, after devoting full years of your adult life to the unpaid work of learning the requisite advanced math and computer science needed to develop such a model, like to spend years more of your life to develop a generative AI model without compensation?
No. I wouldn’t want to write a kernel from scratch for free either. But Linus Torvalds did. He even found a way to monetize it without breaking any laws.
then openai should close its doors
Also anything produced with solar power should be free.
Yes, good point, resource collection is nearly identical to content generation
I doubt it. It would likely kill any non Giant tech backed AI companies though
Microsoft has armies of lawyers and cash to pay. It would make life a lot harder, but they’d survive
If OpenAI owns a Copyright on the output of their LLMs, then I side with the NYT.
If the output is public domain–that is you or I could use it commercially without OpenAI’s permission–then I side with OpenAI.
Sort of like how a spell checker works. The dictionary is Copyrighted, the spell check software is Copyrighted, but using it on your document doesn’t grant the spell check vendor any Copyright over it.
I think this strikes a reasonable balance between creators’ IP rights, AI companies’ interest in expansion, and the public interest in having these tools at our disposal. So, in my scheme, either creators get a royalty, or the LLM company doesn’t get to Copyright the outputs. I could even see different AI companies going down different paths and offering different kinds of service based on that distinction.
I want people to take my code if they share their changes (gpl). Taking and not giving back is just free labor.
I think it currently resides with the one doing the generation and not openAI itself. Officially it is a bit unclear.
Hopefully, all gens become copyleft just for the fact that ais tend to repeat themselves. Specific faces will pop up quite often in image gen for example.
If LLMs like ChatGPT are allowed to produce non-copyrighted work after being trained on copyrighted work, you can effectively use them to launder copyright, which would be equivalent to abolishing it at the limit.
A much more elegant and equitable solution would be to just abolish copyright outright. It’s the natural direction of a country that chooses to invest in LLMs anyways.
The NYT has a market cap of about $8B. MSFT has a market cap of about $3T. MSFT could take a controlling interest in the Times for the change it finds in the couch cushions. I’m betting a good chunk of the c-suites of the interested parties have higher personal net worths than the NYT has in market cap.
I have mixed feelings about how generative models are built and used. I have mixed feelings about IP laws. I think there needs to be a distinction between academic research and for-profit applications. I don’t know how to bring the laws into alignment on all of those things.
But I do know that the interested parties who are developing generative models for commercial use, in addition to making their models available for academics and non-commercial applications, could well afford to properly compensate companies for their training data.
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Or Musk when he decided he didn’t like what people were saying on Twitter.
I completely agree. I don’t want them to buy out the NYT, and I would rather move back to the laws that prevented over-consolidation of the media. I think that Sinclair and the consolidated talk radio networks represent a very real source of danger to democracy. I think we should legally restrict the number of markets a particular broadcast company can be in, and I also believe that we can and should come up with an argument that’s the equivalent of the Fairness Doctrine that doesn’t rest on something as physical and mundane as the public airwaves.
Oh no, how terrible. What ever will we do without Shenanigans Inc. 🙄
YES! AI is cool I guess, but the massive AI circlejerk is so irritating though.
If OpenAI can infringe upon all the copyrighted material on the net then the internet can use everything of theirs all for free too.
This would bring up the cost of entry for making a model and nothing more. OpenAI will buy the data if they have too and so will google. The money will only go to the owners of the New York Times and its shareholders, none of the journalists who will be let go in the coming years will see a dime.
We must keep the entry into the AI game as low as possible or the only two players will be Microsoft and Google. And as our economy becomes increasingly AI driven, this will cement them owning it.
Pragmatism or slavery, these are the two options.
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inshallah
Is there a possible way that both the NYT and OpenAI could lose?
Not without a bunch of lawyers winning.
Honestly, I’d rather OpenAI lose this one, and NYT lose later on in a much more embarrassing manner that cuts all the golden parachutes
The problem with copyright is that everything is automatically copyrighted. The copyright logo is purely symbolic, at this point. Both sides are technically right, even though the courts have ruled that anything an AI outputs is actually in the public domain.
Don’t threaten me with a good time!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Late last year, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies are stealing its copyrighted content to train their large language models and then profiting off of it.
Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and Law held a hearing in which news executives implored lawmakers to force AI companies to pay publishers for using their content.
In its rebuttal, OpenAI said that regurgitation is a “rare bug” that the company is “working to drive to zero.” It also claims that the Times “intentionally manipulated prompts” to get this to happen and “cherry-picked their examples from many attempts.”
A growing list of authors and entertainers have been filing lawsuits since ChatGPT made its splashy debut in the fall of 2022, accusing these companies of copying their works in order to train their models.
Developers have sued OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly stealing software code, while Getty Images is embroiled in a lawsuit against Stability AI, the makers of image-generating model Stable Diffusion, over its copyrighted photos.
In that 2013 decision, Judge Chin said its technology “advances the progress of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders.” And a 2023 economics study of the effects of Google Books found that “digitization significantly boosts the demand for physical versions” and “allows independent publishers to introduce new editions for existing books, further increasing sales.” So consider that another point in favor of giving tech platforms room to innovate.
The original article contains 1,628 words, the summary contains 259 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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